Finland is a quiet, laid-back place, where a ramshackle cottage by a lake and a properly stoked sauna are all that’s required for happiness. lt’s a vast expanse of forests and lakes punctuated by small towns. During the months of the midnight sun, coastal regions are a sailing and fishing paradise; when the nights are cold an long (and they can very, very long), you can huddle inside with a vodka.

May to September to avoid the cold and dark

Poking around the harbourside fish market in Helsinki-there’s everything from salmon and sausages to handicrafts and all manner of reindeer-related souvenirs Spending the afternoon among the ramparts of the historic fortress on Suomenlinna lsland Boating around the islands of Ekenas Archipelago National Park Staying overnight in one of Hanko’s charming Russian villas Dance your hear out at the annual festival of Finnish Tango, Tangomarkkinar Seeing the aurora borealis-nature’s Arctic light show

Read anything by Aleksis Kivi, who founded modern Finnish literature with Seven Brothers, a story of brothers who try to escape civilization in the forest

Listen to Finnish jazz musician Raoul Bjorkenheim, or rock group The Flaming Sideburns

Watch Aki Kauriamaki’s The Man Without a Past, the story of a man who loses his memory and becomes homeless, or the road film Leningrad Cowboys Go America

Eat snow grouse, reindeer stew or glowfired salmon

Drink salmiakkikossu (a home-made spirit combining dissolved liquorice-flavoured sweets with the abrasive Koskenkova vodka-sweet, high-alcohol beer)

Sisu (often translated as ‘guts’, epitomizing Finnish resilience)

Fish; beating oneself with a fragrant branch of birch leaves in a sauna; Nokia phones; the aurora borealis; reindeers; Sami; Moomin trolls

The world’s largest smoke sauna is in Kuopio; the world’s most popular surf instrumentalists are Finnish band Laika-the Cosmonauts

Rarely do you get a chance to see such unadulterated commercialism in one neat little package. This, if Lapland’s claims are true, is the home of Christmas and jolly ol’ Saint Nick. The Santa Claus Main Post Office is here and it receives close to a million letters each year from chidren all over the world. As tacky and this may sound, it’s all good fun. You can send a postcard home with an official Santa or have a photograph with Father Christmas himself (signs warn would-be photographers that Santa is a registered trademark and can only be photographed by his elves!).