5 classic Lapland stories

Read more in our Lapland travel section

It's a week before we take our two children, Emelye 8 and Luke 6, on a four-day, once-in-a-lifetime trip to Lapland and you can imagine the excitement in our house. There’s lots of squealing and shouts of “We’re going to see Santa, the real Santa.” The kids are looking forward to it too. Even if their first reaction on learning about the (very expensive) trip was ‘oh’.

However, on the day of departure, when I woke my daughter in the early hours, she rubbed the sleep from her eyes and whispered: “I’ve been waiting for this moment forever.”

It’s a long journey to Lapland – to reach our base in Muonio on the border with Sweden it’s a three and a half hour flight from Gatwick to Kittila in northern Finland, from where it’s another one hour coach transfer. This is no elaborate excursion to a grotto.

In the following few days we saw (and ate) real reindeers for the first time, tried our hand at lassoing, ice fishing, went inside a real igloo and had hours of fun toboganing outside the hotel. As well as cross-country skiing and taking a sleigh ride through the Narnia-like forest, we met a shaman, who almost upstaged Santa with his elaborate storytelling in an eerie, smoky tent.

Just one of the highlights of the trip was a high-speed dogsled ride through the forest surrounding our hotel on sleighs pulled by Siberian huskies. With the sun not due to rise above the horizon for another five weeks, the eerie twilight lent a surreal atmosphere to the pristine, snowy landscape.

The visit to the Big Man Himself didn’t come until the third afternoon, by which time it was merely the icing on the cake. It was only 3pm but already dark when Emelye, Luke and a dozen or so other children from the hotel were tucked into wagons pulled by snowmobiles and went off into the forest, their parents following on their own snowmobiles.

Every so often the guides would stop to read a note attached to a tree, telling them which way to go. At one point, they urged the children to sing carols to bring out the elves who would lead them to Santa. We stopped at a bonfire in the middle of a clearing, but we barely had time to take in the scene before a couple of elves (two young women in red capes, actually, but the children found them convincing) bounced up to our elbows and ushered Emelye and Luke up a candlelit path to Santa’s cabin.

From the outside, it looked like a Barratt box, but the kids thought it was made out of chocolate, and inside it was exactly what you’d expect – a roaring log fire, a gigantic wooden bed, a big wooden chair, and, of course, Santa Claus. With his long greyish white beard, red gown and elf-like slippers with turned up toes he was impressive, but he wasn’t the jolly, ho-hoing sort of Father Christmas that we’ve all come to expect. Sitting my son on his knee (no laws against that in Lapland, evidently) he boomed: “So Luke, have you been good?” Luke stayed silent. “You are good, most of the time,” went on Santa, rather sternly “but you fight with your sister too much.” Emelye’s chin hit the ground, closely followed by Luke’s. God, this man was good. Very good.

When it was her turn to sit on his lap, Emelye was equally dumb-struck and, as it happened, so were all the children in the group. Not a single one managed to tell him what they wanted for Christmas. They all stumbled out of his house, totally mesmerised by the experience.

Afterwards, as our children made snow angels with one of the elves while we waited for the others to have their turn, a single shaft of green light pierced the blackened sky. We were being treated to a mini display of the Northern Lights. It was a magical moment but my husband Tom broke the spell when, dropping his voice, he leaned towards me and said: “When our kids work out Santa’s not real, they’ll think we’re psychos for going to this much trouble”

Possibly, but for now they think we rank as the best parents ever.

Need to Know

Emagine (0870 9025399) organises three to six-day Santa trips to Finnish Lapland with regular departures from Gatwick and Manchester from December 7 to 27 every year. A four-day trips costs from £869pp, £729 for kids including flights, transfers, full board accommodation, activities, a visit to Santa's grotto, Christmas dinner and safari clothing.

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