The new year is upon us, Christmas is over, with all the lights and trees gone, except in homes where you’ll find a Christmas cone blazing with lights in mid-March. But in one small Finnish city, just six kilometres south of the Arctic Circle with a population of about 64,000, Christmas never stops.
This is Rovaniemi, in the Finn province of Lapland, cradled between the hill of Korkalovaara and the ski-alp of Ounasvaara. Because it is the home of the original Santa Claus, complete with a huge Santa Claus Village and Santa World Arctic Park, where families mostly with young children from Finland and the rest of Europe visit to see Santa throughout the year makes Rovaniemi Airport a hub that handled more than 600,000 passengers in 2022.
