Last month we took a trip to Finnish Lapland. We wanted snow, we wanted the Northern Lights, and we wanted to see Santa Claus. I had come up with the idea a year before when we were all stuck in our houses. I had some fantasy of "the best Christmas ever," and this was part of it. During our November school break there should be snow on the ground in Lapland, and it was a good time to see the Aurora Borealis. So we bought our tickets for the city of Rovaniemi, on the edge of the Arctic Circle.

This was the first time I'd been out of the country in two years, and for obvious reasons I was nervous, but Finland seemed about as safe a destination as I could find. There was the weather to contend with: it would be below freezing the whole time, which meant all of us getting new snow gear. We prepared for more than a week, and then, Thursday before our Saturday departure, we got an unwelcome phone call. The Finnish consul, who had received Oya’s visa application three weeks before, didn't think she had enough time to process the visa and send it in time for us to receive it on Friday. After some frantic discussions, we settled on a solution. If Oya could fly to Ankara Friday morning and pick it up in person from the consulate, would it be ready? It would, the consul agreed, and so Oya booked another flight. By Friday evening she was back in Istanbul, her visa was in-hand, our bags were packed.
We landed in Rovaniemi, on a runway surrounded by snow-dusted forests at mid-day. And then there was another hitch: our bags didn’t arrive. We headed to our hotel, the Arctic Treehouse, outside the city. The taxi driver was a Greek who had moved here for some reason. He had grown up near the Turkish border and spoke some Turkish, too. We had lunch at our hotel while we waited for the next flight to come in. The restaurant had a fireplace off to one side and was filled with light reflected from the snow outside. Sitting, there it felt like we had come to the most distant place on earth, and in some ways we had--we would hit the farthest north any of us had been the next day. Our waitress, who grew up in Kosovo, also spoke Turkish. Of all the world's minor languages, I thought, this one certainly must be the most widely spoken.

By evening, Oya's and Julia's bags arrived, and they put on their snow gear. Meanwhile, I was stuck with a pair of jeans, a flannel shirt and a jacket. While we dealt with the rigamarole of talking with the airline, one of the folks who worked in reception brought us a hot, red drink called glögi, made from fruits and spices, and then, realizing our situation, loaned me an extra hat, gloves, snow pants and an even warmer jacket--enough to finally brave the outdoors and take an evening walk. Our cabin had a bunk built into one wall, accessed by a ladder and closed off by a pair of sliding panels. This became Julia's favorite spot, and she mostly kept out of our hair when we were indoors. Otherwise, the cabin was one room with a massive window, like the ones you see sharks behind in the aquarium, looking out on a forest of birch and spruce trees. In the morning, when we went to breakfast, my bag had finally arrived. The whole trip, from the problem with Oya's visa up to that point, seemed like some larger disaster that kept gaining on us and trying to catch us but that only was able to throw small things in our way until it finally lost steam and faded away.

Everything from that moment onward was great. The breakfast included all the things you associate with Scandinavia: smoked salmon, pickled herring, blueberries in nearly everything, plus sliced reindeer meat and the most interesting condiment I have ever tasted, called kerkkä--a green spruce sprout powder that I sprinkled over almost everything and only describe as giving the closest flavor equivalent to eating a tree I can imagine. Once we were ready to go, we began our walk to our real destination, the "Santa Claus Village," a good mile-and-a-half through the snow. Our walk took us down a long, flat path, with forest on either side. The only sounds were a few birds and the occasional car that came down a highway somewhere just out of sight, beyond the trees. That day, Sunday, was both the clearest and the coldest of the days we spent there. The sun rose around 9:00 and set by 3:00, but by the time it was highest, at noon, it still only sat a bit above the horizon. The streams beside the path were frozen. Here and there were wooden fences surrounding patches of forest. The only wild animals we saw were a couple of large white rabbits and some mice or shrews. The only deviation from the shades of white and gray and green were a bush covered in red fruit with long whiskers, like medlars, which were almost hallucinatory they stood out so much from their surroundings.

And then the scene changed as we emerged from the trees, coming to a red and yellow sign announcing that we had arrived at Napapiiri--the Arctic Circle. The highway we had known was there was now visible, and at the side of the road there was a sign for a Shell station, which seemed impossibly mundane. Off to the other side was a collection of buildings that reminded me of the rangers' stations in U.S. national parks. Julia did a few snow angels, and then we went inside the first place we saw to warm up. It was basically a gift shop, and in one corner there was someone dressed as Santa Claus, and a few kids had lined up to take turns sitting on his lap. I asked Julia if she wanted to meet him, but she told me, “No, that's not the real Santa." And that was that.

Nearby was the Arctic Circle's post office, which I wanted to see, since this is where all letters to Santa from children in the Eastern hemisphere come. There were some letters from kids displayed at the entrance, and then inside there was a whole wall of cubbies full of letters with labels from each country they came from. Julia wrote a few postcards to her friends and cousin and popped them in the mailbox. Back outside, we found the village square, which had the biggest Christmas tree I'd ever seen in one corner. At the far end of the square was the largest building, built of massive timbers, with a roof like a steeple. On the door was a sign that read "Santa Claus Office," and so we went in.

The entrance was dark and wound through narrow hallways with crates stacked on either side. There may have been music playing, but I can't remember what it was. Everything was gray, and it felt like one of those liminal spaces in stories--not the forest in Narnia, but pushing through coats in the wardrobe. Julia turned to me and asked, "Where are we?" We passed a large writing desk and more crates, these ones full of presents, and then a massive mechanical wheel which was, of course, the mechanism Santa uses to slow down the globe's rotation so that he has enough time to deliver all of his presents on Christmas Eve. We went up a flight of stairs and found a small group of people waiting at a door. A short woman whom Julia identified as an elf let groups in one at a time until it was our turn. The room was round, and the ceiling housed another giant gear. The walls were lined in bookcases filled with tall ledgers, and there was a map of the world half-covered in heavy drapes. At the center was Santa, with the longest, curliest white beard I could imagine, sitting in a high-backed chair, dressed not in red velvet but in what looked like Sami clothing. He greeted us in Turkish and the told us to have a seat on a bench off to one side. He asked Julia what she wanted for Christmas, and she told him an airplane that was big enough for her to fly in. "That's a big wish," he said. Julia said she would settle for a stuffed husky. And then he asked her the most important question of all: had she been naughty or nice this year. Julia looked at him and said, "In the middle." "That's a very honest answer," he replied.

When we left, Julia turned to me and said, "I think that was the real Santa.” We bought a photo of our meeting with the real Santa, which maybe makes up for not having our own equivalent of all the years of department store Santa pictures my family took at Frederick & Nelson when I was a kid in Seattle. Just beyond the village square there were woods and a place offering reindeer-driven sleigh rides. We bundled into a rustic wooden sleigh pulled by a reindeer, which was smaller than I had expected. Soon we were on our way down a path through the trees. The sun was setting--not that the sun was visible, but there was a pink glow in the sky along with the gray and white of the woods, so that the whole scene seemed painted in the softest palette imaginable. By the time we returned to the start of the path, the sun was down completely, and it was nearly dark. I think it was 4:00.

We found a hut in the shape of a Sami tent (like a teepee with a chimney at the top), with a wooden sign out front in the shape of a salmon. That was the only thing the place made: salmon grilled on the fireplace in the center of the hut. While we waited, we had a piece of cooked leipäjuusto "squeaky" cheese covered in cloudberry jam. Julia had a cup of glögi, poured from a cast iron kettle, while Oya and I had a Karhu beer. There were snowshoes and poles hung on the inside of the hut's roof, that reminded me of the ones we had on one of the pillars inside Al's Second Hand, our family business when I was a kid. By the time we were done, it was even colder out than before, and so, after a brief stop in a shop selling handcrafts carved from wood and reindeer horns, we took the long path back home.

I was excited that night because the sky was so clear, it seemed like the perfect conditions for the Northern Lights to appear. Around midnight I got an Aurora Borealis alert from an app on my phone. I looked out our giant window but couldn't see anything, so I threw on my coat and boots and stepped outside. I stood on the porch in front of the cabin looking skyward, but I couldn't see anything. Eventually I couldn't stand the cold and went back inside. They never appeared for the rest of the trip. This was the thing I had most looked forward to, but in the end it's up to chance. And it gives me a reason to return someday.











The next day, we took a second walk to the Santa Claus Village for the one thing we hadn't been able to do in the limited daylight, which was to visit a husky farm. There wasn't enough snow on the ground for them to do regular sled rides, they said, but we spent and hour with the dogs, which were all very friendly. Our final day in Rovaniemi, we checked out of our cabin and headed into the city itself, a few miles away. I wanted to visit Arktikum, the Arctic Circle museum. There were rooms full of taxidermied Arctic animals, rooms full of wax people wearing traditional Sami clothing, and others about the Northern Lights and environmental dangers to the Arctic. The exhibit halls are connected by a long (500-foot) glass-covered corridor which ends looking out at a natural pool, apparently a popular swimming place in summer. After we finished our time in the museum, we headed out to the arboretum, which ends at the shore of the Ounasjoki River, which must be a mile wide at that point. It was covered in ice from one side to the other. I don't think I had ever seen a completely frozen river before, and I stood there in the pale blue glow of the late afternoon, just staring at it. It was a different world here. I had thought we could walk further into the city of Rovaniemi, but it didn't look promising, and really, I had seen what I had come for. We took the city bus back to our hotel to collect our bags. It passed through what looked like middle class neighborhoods, full of small houses that would have fit perfectly in the American Midwest, only that they were grouped closer together here.








 

We flew into Helsinki with no problems, luggage or otherwise. I had booked a place on the peninsula of Katajanokka, near the market square and the esplanade, thinking we would walk a bit and do some Christmas shopping during our one day there. The stalls in the market square were almost all closed. We walked to the big Lutheran Cathedral, which is the iconic building of the city. The interior was as austere and Protestant as I had anticipated. The esplanade park was very pretty, though, plus we had a good Japanese meal, and Helsinki is full of nice shops.
In the evening, I realized the one thing I had never done while in Finland was visit a sauna. Because of the pandemic, it seemed like it might not happen, but our hotel had a sauna, and I figured I would give it a shot. I went down late in the evening, when Oya and Julia were watching a Finnish movie on TV. I appeared to have it all to myself and sat there in the heat with the smell of the wood for a bit until two Finnish men came in. They sat at opposite ends of the room, talking across it. My instinct was to leave, but there was something about the language that made me stay: a sound that I couldn't describe, not a single piece of vocabulary that I recognized. A rare feeling in Europe of being somewhere unknown, at least for a moment.