OUTER SPACE
Father Christmas doesn’t set much store by tradition in the town of Saariselkä. It’s August, and his smiling face, hacked out of wood, welcomes people into the town’s supermarket. Two paces inside and there he is again, wielding an axe and lantern, cheeks ruddy and beard fulsome above a red velvet suit. In his defence, we are above the Arctic Circle and he is said to live in the nearby forest – why wouldn’t he use his downtime to pop to the shops for a bottle of blueberry shampoo and a string of elk sausages?
That he is a permanent fixture on the main street of Saariselkä points to the Finnish town’s principal appeal: winter, in all its frosty, twinkling glory. Tourists, hundreds of thousands each year, come to ski through the snow, gaze at the northern lights, and to shuffle up to Santa in a fire-warmed cabin. What they don’t do much is come in summer. If you subscribe to the belief that hell is other people, you’ll find heaven here, out of season.
The Inari region of Lapland is the largest municipality in Finland. It’s home to 7,000 people in an area of 6,693 sq miles
It’s nudging 8°C when I meet Vappu Brännare at the entrance to Urho Kekkonen National Park, a
