Free Christmas audiobooks

There are plenty of Christmas books to get everyone in the mood for the season. But did  you know free Christmas audiobooks are available?

Librivox offers audiobooks of public domain books. What that means is that it provides audio versions of "A Christmas Carol," read by volunteer readers. Here's a version that I thought was pretty good. If you search the site for "Christmas short works,"  you'll see collections of Christmas stories and poems. Librivox also offers an audio book for "The Cricket on the Hearth," Dickens' most popular Christmas story after "A Christmas Carol."

The Librivox books are available as MP3 or Ogg Vorbis files, playable on most MP3 payers or on any computer equipped with a program such as CoolPlayer (for Windows) or VLC Player (for pretty much any kind of computer). Most MP3 files can be burned with a CD burner to make a normal audio CD; ask the computer nerd in your family for help.

Dickens actually wrote five Christmas stories (the others are "The Chimes," "The Battle of Life" and "The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain." All of these are available at Project Gutenberg, usually as texts that can be downloaded to a variety of devices, such as laptop computers and cellular phones, and often as audiobooks, too.