In response to flagging revenues this past year, Yahoo!, Inc., will be shutting down operations from Christmas Eve through New Year’s Day. The shutdown is expected to save the company over 35 million dollars in operational expenses.

The Sunnyvale, CA company plans to turn off its search engine and suspend other services such as Yahoo! Mail, Messenger and other features for the nine-day period. Nearly all of the company’s 13,000 employees will be furloughed without pay during the shutdown, with only maintenance personnel staffing the facilities. Advertisements scheduled to appear on the sites during the holiday period will be rescheduled throughout January and February.

“We apologize for the inconvenience,” an unnamed company spokesperson stated in an online video press release on YouTube today. “We’re doing our best to ensure that our brief hiatus is as painless as possible and we look forward to serving our customers again in the New Year.”

Meanwhile Google and Microsoft have enjoyed increased traffic on their search engine sites and an uptick in registrations for their respective free email services, Gmail and Hotmail. Google has also set up an interface that enables users of Yahoo!’s Flickr image hosting site to automatically port their photos over to Google’s Picasa site.

Most Yahoo users are nonplussed by the move, with surprisingly little commotion in the technology community. One tech blogger casually noted, “I was about to move all my stuff to Google sites anyway…this just gave me the opportunity to do it now.”

Yahoo stock was down slightly at closing today on NASDAQ, losing 11 cents per share.