Visiting Santa’s Home Turf in Lapland, Finland

After spending the first few days of our trip to Lapland, Finland in the small town of Luosto in our log cabin (complete with sauna), we headed for the bright lights of Rovaniemi. Rovaniemi is a town of around 60,000. It is the administrative capital of Lapland, but far more importantly than that, it is the official hometown of Santa Claus!

On our way to Rovaniemi, we stopped at Santa Claus Village – not to be confused with SantaPark. Santa Claus Village is a winter-wonderland themed “village” that offers free admission with paid (expensive!) activities. By contrast, SantaPark, arguably the main attraction in Rovaniemi, offers paid (expensive!) admission with free activities, including the real Santa Claus.

We strolled through the village (and by village, just a retail area, no actual houses here) enjoying the shops and stopped to let the boys do some snowmobiling (expensive!).

While they had fun, the activity was definitely aimed at a younger audience, since they were on mini-snowmobiles and just went around a snow track. The short loop was fine but the 10 minutes we bought for the boys was enough for them.

There is also a live webcam there, which we had watched before we arrived, to check how much snow they had. We let our families know we would be there, so we had fun waving to them back in their respective countries as they logged on to see us.

Santa’s Village also sits right on the arctic circle, so we had to get a photo of that too!

However, we couldn’t stay outside for long because of the cold so we hustled into the post office. The post office is Santa’s actual official post office. This is where all the letters addressed to Santa end up and there was a cool display that showed letters he had received, sorted by country.

The next day, we hit SantaPark right at opening time to try and get ahead of the crowds. In reality, however, we needn’t have bothered as it was still early in the season and never got that busy. SantaPark is the “home cavern” of Santa Claus (yeah, I didn’t know either). This is sort of the pinnacle of Santa-ness in this Santa-themed location. Our kids, at 11, 9 and 7 years old, were definitely on the older side, which is really the reason we wanted to go when we did. However, we were lucky in that the older boys enjoyed watching N enjoy himself, who was all in on the Santa front.

Among the activities, we got our photo taken with Santa, which was free but taking the photo home with you was not (for reference – this family photo was more than 5x more expensive than the one we got when we visited Iguazu Falls, Argentina just a few weeks before).

We also got to attend a workshop on how to be an elf (ran by elves of course)…

…decorated cookies (which we had to buy first – expensive!) …

…and saw a really impressive elf-acrobatic show.

Though it was a fun day out and got us in the Christmas spirit we had more fun doing the other activities…even if it was just playing in the big snow piles dotted around the town.

Some people take trips up to Lapland and their whole vacation is planned around Santa. For us, these few Santa-related activities were enough to get us in the Christmas spirit, but it was really the other outdoor activities that we enjoyed the most. Speaking of “enjoyed the most”, our next post will wrap up our stay in Finland with our very favorite activity of the trip – so stay tuned!