An unusual Christmas holiday – but an obvious one, really – is to take the children to the Arctic to meet Santa. How hard is that? Not very, says Jim Mora.
Lapland is a little like Downton Abbey. The huge and dramatic history is mostly out of sight, and people tend to go there for the visual charm and the costumes.
I knew a bit about Lapland. I regaled the family with stories from World War II. Not a flicker of interest crossed their faces. The Russians invaded, but as they did Finland experienced its coldest winter for years and temperatures dropped to -43°C. The fuel froze in the Russian tanks and the Finns destroyed them with Molotov cocktails. The Russians wore olive green and the Finnish soldiers white. Invisible against the snow, they out-sniped and out-skied an invading army of 600,000. Ancient biplanes went up in gallant sorties against Soviet formations 20 times their size, and the Russians suffered losses four times as great.
I admired the Finns, but I’d never met one. We were all about to meet quite a few, but the children didn’t care about history. They wanted to see Santa. Santa hadn’t fought in the Winter War, although high-speed reindeer could have given the Russian pilots a surprise.
Later in the war the Germans completely destroyed the city of Rovaniemi (about the size of New Plymouth) on the Arctic Circle. We were going there, to that very town. We would be staying in the first place rebuilt, a hotel called the Rantasipi Pohjanhovi, on the banks of a frozen river. For me, it would be a journey into the heart of winter; for the children, an adventure into the domain of elves and Northern Lights. I was curious to see how these two worlds co-existed.
Our stopover was in Singapore. Netbook on knee by the pool, I googled for information on the shock we were in for the following day. We would go from 30°C to -27°C. I wondered if the beanie, the ski jacket and the fingerless gloves would be enough. The children were well kitted out, but no amount of clothing seemed adequate for -27°C. I searched for “frostbite”, and found it was highly dependent on wind velocity. Somehow Lapland at Christmas would be calm, as in Silent Night, I told myself.
A night train can take you north from Helsinki for 800km, and we thought this romantic: speeding to the Arctic for 13 hours through fabled forests, the carriages reflected in cerulean lakes, and with herds of reindeer wheeling and running at our approach. So it suggested itself in my imagination. Somehow I had forgotten it would be pitch black for the whole journey. The train is nice, though, a triumph of compacted accommodation, with built-in alarm clocks, bottled water and concealed bathrooms that swivel out from the wall.
As we trundled north, with regular tooting for reasons unseen, we began to lose our jet lag and relax. I’ve never worked out why rail’s noises and rhythms afford such comfort, but I remember the same feeling as a small boy on the old inter-island ferries between Wellington and Lyttelton. With the family asleep in their bunks, I would lie on the warm floor with my ear pressed to it, trying to decipher the ship’s mysterious internal conversation. Maturity confines me to my bed now in this respect, but the ears are still alert.
Forests cover 75% of Finland. According to some website devoted to boreal forests of the world, you could cut down all their pine and birch trees and build a 5m-high, 10m-wide wall right around the globe. And where there aren’t trees, little lakes fill the gaps – there are 180,000 of them.
It was a reassuring -17°C when we arrived in Rovaniemi. Our guide took one look at us and drove straight to a warehouse. We were kitted out with thoroughly warm (if inelegant) clothing to be returned when we left. From then on, the principal peril was walking on icy, sloping footpaths. This was managed by a kind of cautious tottering, of which, thankfully, no family video exists. The rest was easy.
In our hotel an underground tunnel led us to our room. The Finns know how to keep cold out, and I imagine their electricity infrastructure is left less to chance than ours. Most people speak English, and in their casual savviness there is more than an echo of the Kiwi way. Most impressively, they drive on their roads just like we do in temperatures 30 degrees warmer.
As part of a prebooked package you can dabble tamely (but with young children, engagingly) in a reindeer sleigh ride, ice fishing, skiing, snow-shoeing and – my favourite – driving a snowmobile along a frozen river. The best activity for our kids was free: sliding. In parks and malls there are ice slides – frozen hillocks, essentially – and that would have kept them happy all day. Well, all night, actually, seeing as the day didn’t start until late morning then disappeared mid-afternoon.
The highlight, of course, the reason for the unseasonality, is Santa’s workshop inside the Arctic Circle. Essentially, it’s a shopping experience. Seeing Santa is free, but a koha ensures the great man gives your children a modest gift. Walking to his lair (decked out as a library) is impressive. It’s a labyrinthine approach, with the centrepiece a huge clock with its hands stopped. That was the eureka moment for our little tribe. Santa manages to deliver all the world’s presents in a single night because he stops time.
Santa himself was perhaps a little sterner than I’d anticipated, from googling other people’s reviews. I think sometimes when the mood is upon him he can be jollier and evince greater interest in one’s place of origin.
That was the quintessence of Christmas for the children, but for the adults? We agreed that despite the look of it all, with every tree in Lapland white with snow, and the obligatory elves throwing snowballs at you, what it felt most like was … winter. As a child I felt cheated out of the white Christmas experience, but the visual splendour doesn’t altogether outweigh the lack of ease. In shorts at a barbecue started to seem the proper way of celebrating.
Energetic vodka consumption and elevated (if that’s the right word) levels of depression are said to accompany life that far north, but, of course, we saw only smiles. Those were too warm to call them faux, even though this is a tourist town. The Laplanders make it easy to visit them. Their Arctic museum is excellent, and there is a Christmas card-type photograph almost everywhere you look.
It’s not a hard experience once you acclimatise, and the Finnish Christmas dinner was great. Reindeer meat – a gamier version of veal – is an acquired taste, but they know that. There’s plenty else on offer.
Ours was a tourist experience, but remarkable for all that. You know, in the middle of this vast whiteness, that you cannot get any further from home, in every way, than to spend Christmas in a place like this.