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In the beginning ...... was Father Christmas
A long time ago, we hit upon the idea of taking children to meet the real Father Christmas. And in Lapland we found exactly what our young and young at heart travellers wanted. Then as now, the secret lay in travelling to villages in the snows where traditional Finnish Lutheran customs are played out on a small scale. There, Father Christmas can service his sledges and reindeer against a background of snow covered forests. And teams of huskies can happily bark up all the wrong trees, whilst
you enjoy snowmobile rides and experience the habits and habitats of the reindeer and the huskies.
Unfortunately (one might say) the idea caught on so well that the mass-market operators felt they had to come crashing into the act. However, some villages were not big enough for their masses, so they persuaded the inhabitants of Rovaniemi, the so called capital of Finnish Lapland,
Saariselka and Levi to put on snow-dusted plastic replicas of the real thing with discos, bars and all the other home “comforts” the mass-market seems unable to do without. Such trips have all the magic of a visit to a shopping centre in Croydon after a freak fall of snow (with apologies to Croydon).
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But such once-in-a-lifetime experiences, we feel, need to be just that - genuine, traditional, memorable, mystical and exciting. We offer tobogganing and snowmobiling, not discos; ice-fishing, not fast food; pine clad rooms or open-fired log cabins, not soulless cell blocks; and herds of huskies, not people.
To avoid the masses, we’ve retreated to just three special places, Harriniva, Yllashumina and and Kakslauttanen. We have departures on the 9th, 14th, 15th, 16th,
18th, 19th and 22nd December and over New Year for no more than 50 people at a time. If you would like to join us, we would love to have you but please remember: no discothèques, no fruit machines and no television. Just a family Christmas or New Year with like-minded people.
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