Whenever the news came on last week, my husband would have to yell only one word for the rest of the family to cluster, shining-eyed, around the box. “Crapland!” he’d holler. “Quick, Crapland!” Like millions of others, we couldn’t get enough of the coverage of the now world-famous Christmas theme park called Lapland New Forest, which is only world-famous, of course, for being absolute rubbish.

We lapped up the wails of complaint from the punters who had shelled out up to £30 a head for the privilege of inspecting two huskies tethered to kennels, a billboard depicting the nativity across a dirty wasteland and a Christmas market consisting of schmutter spilling out of cardboard boxes plonked on the floor.

We went online to compare the promised smorgasbord of gemütlich seasonal enchantments – from a tunnel of light to an ice-rink to a bustling Christmas market, all in the magical setting of a snowy “winter wonderland” – with the gritty, grim reality on the Dorset-Hampshire border.

We even felt obscurely disappointed when it closed in scenes of purest farce last week – a woman dressed as a particularly hefty elf stood outside shrieking: “Santa’s dead” – because that meant no more Crapland stories to enthral us this Christmastide.

Not that closure could make much difference at this stage: Lapland New Forest, and its comical organisers, Henry and Victor Mears, had come, in only a few turns of the news cycle, to represent everything that is worst about rip-off Britain at this special time of year.

The lure of theme parks is always a slight mystery to me. We still have Legoland nightmares in our house, and even my children were exhausted by Disneyland. As for Chessington and Alton Towers, well, these are established, well-run, regulated, genuine visitor “attractions” – and they’re still hideous days out.

So the real surprise of Crapland is – why was anyone surprised that it was a horrible scam and a letdown? What on earth did they expect? Real elves twin-kling? Deep, crisp snow? A very, very shiny nose on a genuine Rudolf?

I know, thousands of people have admitted that they were taken in by the website claiming to have recreated Lapland a mere 1,200 miles south of the Arctic Circle. So they trekked hundreds of miles and spent hundreds of pounds on family outings to a location that looked and felt, when they arrived, just like a car-boot sale on a ring road.

It was, as every visitor explained with trembling lips (the disappointed kiddies) and clenched fists (the parents), about as far from the advertised snow-capped, icicle-clad fantasy as it is possible to imagine. “We can assure you of an absolutely magical scene,” the website promised. “Just look at how real and cold the ‘snow’ appears to be!”

Or as Amanda Goodenough, from Blandford, Dorset, put it after spending £150 on tickets for her family: “The park was a complete misrepresentation, leaving my children heartbroken.”

And of course restive visitors queued up to complain viciously about everything, from the three-hour wait to see Father Christmas in “Santa’s Grotty”, to the fact that the burger buns were stale. Dorset county councils’s trading standards department has received more than 2,000 angry complaints, which is all fair enough.

Clearly the scammers are truly vile people, not because they tried and failed to bring winter wonderland to the shires, but because they exploited loving parents desperate, even in these credit-crunchy days, to “give the kids a treat” at Christmas.

Now, while I am all for seeing little children’s faces light up (though the only one lighting up at Lapland New Forest was a stressed Santa sparking a fag behind a prefab “log” cabin), frankly, I reckon that all those loving grown-ups who spent money on going to Dorset in order to feel festive on a cold November morning must have been out of their tiny minds.

I’m not saying that the organisers haven’t fleeced their customers in the most shameless way (even Eddie Grundy off The Archers wouldn’t stoop so low) but surely all those who took time off work and went with their children were setting themselves up for a fall.

My sympathy is especially stretched for the parents, who, when they finally got there and found out it was a muddy field rather than, say, the famous Christ-kindlmarkt in Nuremberg – went shouty crackers.

As one security guard reported, “Santa was punched by a furious father who had been waiting in line for four hours – he’d got to the front only to be told he couldn’t take a picture of his children and that they weren’t allowed to sit on Santa’s lap.” He also described how a girl elf was slapped in the face by a mother “who was angry that her children were disappointed”. Nobody comes out of this well.

There’s no doubt that the blogs are heartrending: “Complete waste of money and the journey, my son was so excited, what a disappointment. We basically paid £50 to stand for two hours to see Santa – could have seen him for free at the garden centre. I want my money back, it’s not money I can afford to lose. ”

But the saddest thing of all? That parents, even in a recession, think that the only way of “feeling Christmassy” is to spend hundreds of pounds on an “experience”. It’s not. Look, I think we agree that recreating Lapland was always going to be a stretch. But nativity plays, carol services, making and eating mince pies, decorating the tree, spending time with the annoying uncle – all the best things about the traditional Yule – are all heartwarming, festive, almost free . . . and I commend them to the house. In the end, the story of Lapland New For- There is something unintentionally sublime in the delusion displayed by Lady Naipaul, wife of the Nobel-winning Sir Vidia, in this month’s Tatler. She’s contributed a diary of a trip to Africa, and full of plums it is too, especially if you’re curious about creative partnerships. If you believe Nadira Naipaul’s account, you are left thinking there’s been an awful mistake – she’s the important one, not Sir Vidia; and without her expert literary assistance, he probably can’t write even his own name.

“Every Ugandan who meets us smiles in a knowing way – their eyes light up when they shake my hand,” she writes. “I have helped VSN with five books and, believe me, each was no picnic.” Lady Naipaul exhibits all the symptoms of a wife in the advanced stages of Muse syndrome, but – knowing what we know about Sir Vidia’s appalling treatment of his first wife – we can’t help feeling that he might have had her coming.

rachel.johnson@sunday-times.co.uk

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