Lapp of the Gods
I’m one hour into the trip, 30,000 feet up over an icy ocean on four hours’ sleep and two cups of machine coffee. I’m beginning to regret taking this assignment.
It’s a hair after 6am. As a means to entertain them, some of the hundred-odd hyperactive toddlers accompanying me have ill-advisedly been allowed access to the inflight PA system. Delirious with power, they’re showing no mercy, and have immediately broken out into a hangover-piercing chorus of ‘When Santa Got Stuck Up the Chimney’. I expect it’s different when it's "one of your own" but I'd failed to procure a small child to bring with me. I couldn’t help feeling that I’d rather be Saint Nick, dangling precariously from a sooty, undersized flue, cursing my dietary habits as I nervously eye the smouldering coals, than in my present predicament.
Flying to meet Santa Claus at his arctic hideaway is the kind of trip that I’d always thought was the reserve of a certain demographic of child. Specifically, either petulant brats with rich parents or terminally ill children with a bucket list. But no. Apparently it’s open season as far as Santa visitation rights go these days. Every kid with the ability to blub at annoying levels until their parents signed the booking forms are winging their gift-obsessed way northwards to sniff out, hunt down, and possibly kill via the medium of pestering, Father Christmas.
The carols on the plane begin to wear a bit thin, even for those people related by blood to the infant singers. One of the cabin crew suggests the children tell some jokes, a suggestion that is immediately withdrawn as the first eight year old steps up to the microphone.
“What do you call a woman with two black eyes?”
His dad, who you suspect had told this joke to his son in a moment of misguided conspiratorial misogyny, positively shoots down the aisle to grab the mic from his son’s hand, though sadly not before the charming punchline “Nothing – you’ve already told her twice” has been delivered to a crowd of open-mouthed passengers.
God bless us, every one!
Our destination, Rovaniemi in Finnish Lapland, is, on the face of things, intriguing. After all, it's not every day that you get the chance to step inside the Arctic Circle, and with the sun beaming down as we made our descent on a crisp December morning, just how cold could it be?
Minus thirty-five is a temperature that I never thought I’d have to negotiate, but apparently some people actually live in these conditions. Even the fur-clad local guides who meet us in the special decompression room at the airport have to concede that it’s "a bit chilly".
We arrive the day of a freak cold snap, and day-to-day operations are running like clockwork. Finnish children have it hard - apparently school is only cancelled if temperatures dip below minus forty, when presumably the teachers are all too busy fighting off advanced hypothermia to give out maths homework.
But there’s no time for sitting around, weighing up the chances of taking the return flight with all your limbs gangrene-free; we’re here to “find Santa”, which evidently means, “be lead through the unforgiving Arctic snowscape via a series of vaguely Christmas-themed activities to a jobbing Nordic drama student in a rented costume.” Without wanting to seem Scrooge-like, I’m already doubtful about my chances of being able to jingle any, let alone all, of the way.
Before we left the airport, we were kitted out in welcome layers of thermal overalls and boots to insulate our extremities. Outside, even though everyone is wrapped up impenetrably, you can tell it’s a different kind of cold. Cold that could really hurt you. That said, the immediate scenery is pretty spectacular, especially if you’re into heavy snowfall and fir trees as a central motif.
To get things rolling, we’re lead into a teepee and offered a cup of warm milk that comes from an unspecified mammal. Our guides repeatedly inform us that this mystery animal is “kept on the premises”. This information is neither reassuring nor worrying. I suppose I;m glad that it has local living arrangements, but beyond that, I’m pretty ambivalent, to be honest.
We assemble around a small campfire and sit as a nervous girl in national costume daubs each of our faces in charcoal for no readily obvious reason. She mutters something under her strikingly visible breath. I just catch a slightly chilling, “You are all my reindeer now!”. Were we just initiated into a sinister Lappish cult?
This baffling ceremony over, we go outside to meet some actual reindeer. Sadly, they fail to live up to their musical reputations. The extent of their ‘reindeer games’, for example, only stretches to them forlornly dragging us around a circular track while the brutal temperature worms its way into our snowsuits.
Granted, my sledge-puller does indeed have a very shiny nose, but I have a feeling that this is more symptomatic of a virulent strain of reindeer flu than any kind of suitability to leading Santa’s sleigh team. After a certain amount of dashing through the snow, though not much laughing as we go, we stop for lunch. My thoughts wander to whether Rudolph and his cohorts are going to make a guest appearance on the menu.
We refuel, and the sun is already setting as we head back out into the wilderness at the crack of noon. There are only a couple of hours of winter daylight this far north, but it makes a fittingly dramatic backdrop for our chance to drive snowmobiles into the forest. I’m told that technically, they should be referred to as ‘skidoos’. ‘Skidoos’ sound much less safe than ‘snowmobiles’, but when in Rovaniemi.
Handily, the sound of the engines drowns out the frostbitten wailing of the increasingly bored toddlers. They’re getting weary of having to put up with all this atmospheric world-building and just want to get their grubby mitts on some yuletide loot.
I’m too busy to care, fulfilling my secret agent fantasies, ripping through the woods on the diesel-powered skidoo, taking corners at high speed as I dodge imaginary bullets and praying that Santa’s gift to me would be a few uninterrupted minutes in front of a heater.
This is all going quite well until I bank ungracefully into an off-piste snowdrift, only then hearing the cries of protest from the mother and child on the plastic sled that I’d been towing. Luckily, the only real damage done is to my driving credibility and we finally stumble across a woodland cabin. We’re informed that “this could be the place we were looking for”. I sense that violence might erupt if it somehow turns out not to be.
The guides have been incredibly energetic so far. They set about whipping up the surviving children into states of frenzied, festive excitement as we prepare to enter Santa's prefab grotto.
Disappointingly, this magical world doesn’t offer much shelter, the arctic drafts blasting through the tarp. The only heat source is the faint glow of a coal fire, which is eclipsed by the corpulent philanthropist himself, who sits regally in the centre of the room. The children suddenly focus, and pull out their Christmas lists. Some are the size of legal reference books, complete with complicated cross-referencing systems. The adults pull out their hip flasks. I’m offered, and take, a medicinal nip.
There’s a tangible feeling of stress in the air, though. Are the next few moments going to deliver as much magic as the parents felt they’d paid for? There’s a frenzy of camera lashes as each of the awe-struck children are lead by Santa's helpers up to the man himself. The kids all smile and laugh, and even for the most cynical and childless amongst us, it’s a heartwarming sight.
Jesus, I think. Brandy really goes to your head quickly at these temperatures.
The cajoling, pleading and bargaining over, the man himself makes a noticeably swift exit through a back door. The children are no longer too concerned with his presence or absence now that their demands have been negotiated in person. We’re allowed to warm ourselves by the fire briefly. A happy-looking six year old sits next to me, and I ask him if he’d enjoyed coming to find Santa.
"Oh yes! It's been very good! Like magic!"
“How was it, actually meeting him in person?”
"I was a bit scared. But then I sat on his knee and he was very friendly. He made me laugh!"
“Will he be stopping by your house on Christmas Eve then?”
"Well,” says the boy, “He said he would, but I don't think it will be him, because when I looked very hard I could see the sellotape under his beard."
Ah, the magic of Christmas. Dress it up how you will, it still boils down to a fake beard and a fat suit.
The business end of things taken care of, we’re shepherded out of the cabin and back into the now pitch black glacial tundra, where most of us take up the offer of an impromptu husky dog ride.
The mutts are obviously gagging for a hot bowl of doggie chow, judging by their enthusiasm to get the rides over with. Each punter, hitherto rendered numb to almost any sensory stimulus by the cold, is suddenly sat bolt upright as their flimsy wooden sled is whipped around the icy track. The dogs actually seem faster than the skidoos, and I have to admit it’s exhilarating, in the way that I imagine catching your hand in the spin cycle of a washing machine must be.
Later, we’re whisked away by coach to ‘sample’ (i.e. be coerced into paying over the odds for) traditional Lappish crafts in Ye Olde Neon-Lit Shopping Centre. Most of us choose to forgo the hat making demonstrations and “the chance to say goodbye to Santa”. This extra photo op already has a queue reaching the sign that said “You Are Forty Minutes Away From Santa”. I have a feeling that most of the goodbyes were being said amid frenzied attempts to add to their lists. Some presents had slipped the children’s minds until they’d caught a glimpse of what someone else had ordered.
For the rest of us, it’s time for the concerted drinking of alcohol-infused coffees and a cursory re-acquaintance with the nerve endings at the tips of our limbs. One transfer to the airport later and we’re clambering onto the plane, performing the compulsory check to make sure we hadn’t left anything behind – any fingers, for example.
The in-flight film entertainment is announced by the attendant as “Shriek”. I had visions of a feature-length infant’s carol service, though thankfully it turns out to be the less sinister “Shrek”. By the time the opening credits roll, most of the target audience are already sound asleep, replaying the finer points of their facetime with Santa, dreaming contentedly of the coming week’s material gains.
DMIID #1
It’s a hair after 6am. As a means to entertain them, some of the hundred-odd hyperactive toddlers accompanying me have ill-advisedly been allowed access to the inflight PA system. Delirious with power, they’re showing no mercy, and have immediately broken out into a hangover-piercing chorus of ‘When Santa Got Stuck Up the Chimney’. I expect it’s different when it's "one of your own" but I'd failed to procure a small child to bring with me. I couldn’t help feeling that I’d rather be Saint Nick, dangling precariously from a sooty, undersized flue, cursing my dietary habits as I nervously eye the smouldering coals, than in my present predicament.
Flying to meet Santa Claus at his arctic hideaway is the kind of trip that I’d always thought was the reserve of a certain demographic of child. Specifically, either petulant brats with rich parents or terminally ill children with a bucket list. But no. Apparently it’s open season as far as Santa visitation rights go these days. Every kid with the ability to blub at annoying levels until their parents signed the booking forms are winging their gift-obsessed way northwards to sniff out, hunt down, and possibly kill via the medium of pestering, Father Christmas.
The carols on the plane begin to wear a bit thin, even for those people related by blood to the infant singers. One of the cabin crew suggests the children tell some jokes, a suggestion that is immediately withdrawn as the first eight year old steps up to the microphone.
“What do you call a woman with two black eyes?”
His dad, who you suspect had told this joke to his son in a moment of misguided conspiratorial misogyny, positively shoots down the aisle to grab the mic from his son’s hand, though sadly not before the charming punchline “Nothing – you’ve already told her twice” has been delivered to a crowd of open-mouthed passengers.
God bless us, every one!
Our destination, Rovaniemi in Finnish Lapland, is, on the face of things, intriguing. After all, it's not every day that you get the chance to step inside the Arctic Circle, and with the sun beaming down as we made our descent on a crisp December morning, just how cold could it be?
Minus thirty-five is a temperature that I never thought I’d have to negotiate, but apparently some people actually live in these conditions. Even the fur-clad local guides who meet us in the special decompression room at the airport have to concede that it’s "a bit chilly".
We arrive the day of a freak cold snap, and day-to-day operations are running like clockwork. Finnish children have it hard - apparently school is only cancelled if temperatures dip below minus forty, when presumably the teachers are all too busy fighting off advanced hypothermia to give out maths homework.
But there’s no time for sitting around, weighing up the chances of taking the return flight with all your limbs gangrene-free; we’re here to “find Santa”, which evidently means, “be lead through the unforgiving Arctic snowscape via a series of vaguely Christmas-themed activities to a jobbing Nordic drama student in a rented costume.” Without wanting to seem Scrooge-like, I’m already doubtful about my chances of being able to jingle any, let alone all, of the way.
Before we left the airport, we were kitted out in welcome layers of thermal overalls and boots to insulate our extremities. Outside, even though everyone is wrapped up impenetrably, you can tell it’s a different kind of cold. Cold that could really hurt you. That said, the immediate scenery is pretty spectacular, especially if you’re into heavy snowfall and fir trees as a central motif.
To get things rolling, we’re lead into a teepee and offered a cup of warm milk that comes from an unspecified mammal. Our guides repeatedly inform us that this mystery animal is “kept on the premises”. This information is neither reassuring nor worrying. I suppose I;m glad that it has local living arrangements, but beyond that, I’m pretty ambivalent, to be honest.
We assemble around a small campfire and sit as a nervous girl in national costume daubs each of our faces in charcoal for no readily obvious reason. She mutters something under her strikingly visible breath. I just catch a slightly chilling, “You are all my reindeer now!”. Were we just initiated into a sinister Lappish cult?
This baffling ceremony over, we go outside to meet some actual reindeer. Sadly, they fail to live up to their musical reputations. The extent of their ‘reindeer games’, for example, only stretches to them forlornly dragging us around a circular track while the brutal temperature worms its way into our snowsuits.
Granted, my sledge-puller does indeed have a very shiny nose, but I have a feeling that this is more symptomatic of a virulent strain of reindeer flu than any kind of suitability to leading Santa’s sleigh team. After a certain amount of dashing through the snow, though not much laughing as we go, we stop for lunch. My thoughts wander to whether Rudolph and his cohorts are going to make a guest appearance on the menu.
We refuel, and the sun is already setting as we head back out into the wilderness at the crack of noon. There are only a couple of hours of winter daylight this far north, but it makes a fittingly dramatic backdrop for our chance to drive snowmobiles into the forest. I’m told that technically, they should be referred to as ‘skidoos’. ‘Skidoos’ sound much less safe than ‘snowmobiles’, but when in Rovaniemi.
Handily, the sound of the engines drowns out the frostbitten wailing of the increasingly bored toddlers. They’re getting weary of having to put up with all this atmospheric world-building and just want to get their grubby mitts on some yuletide loot.
I’m too busy to care, fulfilling my secret agent fantasies, ripping through the woods on the diesel-powered skidoo, taking corners at high speed as I dodge imaginary bullets and praying that Santa’s gift to me would be a few uninterrupted minutes in front of a heater.
This is all going quite well until I bank ungracefully into an off-piste snowdrift, only then hearing the cries of protest from the mother and child on the plastic sled that I’d been towing. Luckily, the only real damage done is to my driving credibility and we finally stumble across a woodland cabin. We’re informed that “this could be the place we were looking for”. I sense that violence might erupt if it somehow turns out not to be.
The guides have been incredibly energetic so far. They set about whipping up the surviving children into states of frenzied, festive excitement as we prepare to enter Santa's prefab grotto.
Disappointingly, this magical world doesn’t offer much shelter, the arctic drafts blasting through the tarp. The only heat source is the faint glow of a coal fire, which is eclipsed by the corpulent philanthropist himself, who sits regally in the centre of the room. The children suddenly focus, and pull out their Christmas lists. Some are the size of legal reference books, complete with complicated cross-referencing systems. The adults pull out their hip flasks. I’m offered, and take, a medicinal nip.
There’s a tangible feeling of stress in the air, though. Are the next few moments going to deliver as much magic as the parents felt they’d paid for? There’s a frenzy of camera lashes as each of the awe-struck children are lead by Santa's helpers up to the man himself. The kids all smile and laugh, and even for the most cynical and childless amongst us, it’s a heartwarming sight.
Jesus, I think. Brandy really goes to your head quickly at these temperatures.
The cajoling, pleading and bargaining over, the man himself makes a noticeably swift exit through a back door. The children are no longer too concerned with his presence or absence now that their demands have been negotiated in person. We’re allowed to warm ourselves by the fire briefly. A happy-looking six year old sits next to me, and I ask him if he’d enjoyed coming to find Santa.
"Oh yes! It's been very good! Like magic!"
“How was it, actually meeting him in person?”
"I was a bit scared. But then I sat on his knee and he was very friendly. He made me laugh!"
“Will he be stopping by your house on Christmas Eve then?”
"Well,” says the boy, “He said he would, but I don't think it will be him, because when I looked very hard I could see the sellotape under his beard."
Ah, the magic of Christmas. Dress it up how you will, it still boils down to a fake beard and a fat suit.
The business end of things taken care of, we’re shepherded out of the cabin and back into the now pitch black glacial tundra, where most of us take up the offer of an impromptu husky dog ride.
The mutts are obviously gagging for a hot bowl of doggie chow, judging by their enthusiasm to get the rides over with. Each punter, hitherto rendered numb to almost any sensory stimulus by the cold, is suddenly sat bolt upright as their flimsy wooden sled is whipped around the icy track. The dogs actually seem faster than the skidoos, and I have to admit it’s exhilarating, in the way that I imagine catching your hand in the spin cycle of a washing machine must be.
Later, we’re whisked away by coach to ‘sample’ (i.e. be coerced into paying over the odds for) traditional Lappish crafts in Ye Olde Neon-Lit Shopping Centre. Most of us choose to forgo the hat making demonstrations and “the chance to say goodbye to Santa”. This extra photo op already has a queue reaching the sign that said “You Are Forty Minutes Away From Santa”. I have a feeling that most of the goodbyes were being said amid frenzied attempts to add to their lists. Some presents had slipped the children’s minds until they’d caught a glimpse of what someone else had ordered.
For the rest of us, it’s time for the concerted drinking of alcohol-infused coffees and a cursory re-acquaintance with the nerve endings at the tips of our limbs. One transfer to the airport later and we’re clambering onto the plane, performing the compulsory check to make sure we hadn’t left anything behind – any fingers, for example.
The in-flight film entertainment is announced by the attendant as “Shriek”. I had visions of a feature-length infant’s carol service, though thankfully it turns out to be the less sinister “Shrek”. By the time the opening credits roll, most of the target audience are already sound asleep, replaying the finer points of their facetime with Santa, dreaming contentedly of the coming week’s material gains.
DMIID #1