Meeting THE Santa in Finland

Guest Post by: Accounting & IS Senior Conner York. He is a Foster School Undergraduate on exchange at the Copenhagen Business School in Copenhagen, Denmark for Fall Semester 2018. 

A group of us foreign students studying at Copenhagen Business School recently took a weekend trip up to Rovaniemi in Lapland, Finland. If you ever get the chance to venture up to Rovaniemi, I highly recommend you do so. There are a good number of activities to do in the city: we went to a local nature museum, visited a reindeer park, drove out to a national park, and of course, visited Santa.

If you didn’t already know, Rovaniemi is home to Santa Clause Village and is said to be the official home of Santa Clause. If you ever sent a letter to Santa, this is where it gets sent to. The group of us met Santa there, and he was really fun to talk to. He greeted each of us in our native language (including French, Spanish, Italian, and Korean) which was very impressive and something I never would’ve thought to be necessary for a Santa to do. I’ve never gotten pictures with Santa before, but I am glad I got this one. Also, you can send a post card from Santa’s post office, and they stamp it with a special Santa’s Village postage stamp.

We unfortunately did not get the chance to see the Northern Lights due to weather, but there are several opportunities to do so in the town. A quick five minute walk gets you away from the lights and close enough to the water where you can see the glowing lights, or there are several guided tours you can pay to increase your chances of seeing them. Happy hunting!