A week in near-darkness became my daughter’s last true childhood holiday

May 14, 2026 — 5:00am

It’s nearly sunset, and we sling our skis over our shoulders for the walk down to the iced lake to catch the last of the sunlight.

Here, in Finnish Lapland, the sun’s brief progression across the sky starts just before 11am and ends by 1.30pm, the brief sunset burnishing the heavy snow with a rose cast.

I’m on the cusp of the Arctic Circle with my young daughter for a week-long Finnish family Christmas. Designed by UK adventure company Exodus Adventure Travels, we’re waving the flag for Australia in our small group of families from the UK and South Africa.

Over the week, we’ll discover we are all looking for a different Christmas; removed from the relentless commercialism, from the crush of end-of-year events, from the expectations and the commitments beyond anything but our own immediate families.

We’re only 200 kilometres from the ho-ho kitsch of Santa Claus’ ‘official’ home in Rovaniemi, but Oulanka National Park, in Finland’s east, is a world away from the tinsel and top 10 carols. Set 850km north-east of Helsinki, we’re shielded within a snowy cocoon on the Russian border. It’s a week past winter solstice and not quite kaamos, as the polar night is known here, yet it’s relatively warm, hovering around -5ºC, but we all relish the drop to a blood-thickening -22ºC, shielded in our issued Finnish snow gear.

Standing on the icy Juuma lake, watching the sun slip behind the trees, we can’t know that the world will soon close, and that for two years we’ll be snared and corralled into a shrunken world as Melbourne endures its seemingly endless lockdowns.

For those long years, we’ll harbour the memories of snow-laden pines and air so cold and pure it freezes tears to eyelashes and sends moustaches grey with frozen exhaled breath.

Later, in our minds, we’ll trade our too-familiar bedrooms for a log cabin in the forest, with its warmed floors and rough-hewn furniture of honeyed wood, cloaked in homely cloths. At Oulanka Basecamp, our home for the Christmas week, life in the communal cabin orbits around a vast fireplace, where we’ll eat, talk, craft and plan our adventures with the Finnish staff.

“They’re the weird cousins of Scandinavia,” warns my Swedish family, smugly. Socially inept. Withdrawn. Silent.

Oddly, their harsh assessment of Finns seems what we all are looking for. On a dark Christmas Eve, we craft giant paper snowflakes to decorate the hall and the enormous, fragrant tree. It’s supposed to be a children’s activity, but I am not the only parent intrigued by our Finnish host Hanne’s sharp, clever scissors, and sit down to try my hand.

On other evenings, I’m drawn to the beautiful photography of quiet Mikko, whose studies of white-coated stoats and wolverines make me want to return in summer, when Oulanka transforms into a land of lakes and bears, its taiga, or boreal forests, a vibrant green.

Each morning, the Finnish staff will serve whole-grain porridges which, like little bears, our children wolf down with honey, cream and forest berries. And each evening, we’ll gather again for roasted meats, winter salads and thick, dark bread. One night, we snowshoe to a little campsite where wood fires burn bright, simmering cauldrons yielding dinner of rich elk stew and mashed potato, garnished with lingonberry jam and the obligatory pickled cucumber.

Later, as we snowshoe back to our cabins, the Finns ask us to shuffle in silence, to listen to the snow, to hear the night forest.

It’s not all silence and quiet indoor play; outside the main cabin, a snowy path leads down to the frozen lake, a path that each night morphs into an icy luge trail. Whooping like wild things, the children pair up to hurl themselves down, face-first, on plastic sledges for hours, while the grown-ups form a sauna gang, the thought of impending orthodontic bills chased away by tales of sauna elves. With all lakes frozen, we simply roll in the snow every 15 minutes to cool off, our whoops rivalling those of our children.

However, all our howls combined are easily eclipsed by those of the 80 Siberian and Alaskan huskies who take us deep into the forests of nearby Riisitunturi National Park on sleds. They growl and snap as we tear betwixt ghost trees - spruce bowed by tykky, as Finns call this sculptural icy snow. I’m howling inside, though, as I’ve been given the reins of a set of six fast, lean hounds, and am charged with not running us into a snow drift.

Some families disappear for a day’s downhill skiing at the nearby Ruka ski resort, but cross-country skiing was born here in Scandinavia as a means to travel and is – unlike in Australia – cool. We are to the ocean born, and snow is not in our blood, but my nine-year-old slips easily into the meditative shush of walk-gliding over the frozen lakes, to be rewarded for her efforts with rich hot chocolate, a memory that stays long on the tongue after the cup is drained.

There are snow angels to be made, ice fortresses and igloos to be carved, with card and board games when it’s simply too cold or too dark outside. My daughter locks fast onto another only child, Libby from Manchester, and together they alternate between colouring in and diving headlong into snow, petting baby reindeer and tracing fox tracks in the frozen ground.

It’s the last holiday of my daughter’s true girlhood – before the bitterness and isolation of homeschooling means she won’t play with another child for months at a time; no hand holding and whispered secrets in a world of social distancing.

In the two long COVID years that follow our Finnish Christmas, the borderless freedom and wild expanses of snow and ice let my mind roam free when my body could not, memories cherished even when the world opens once again.

The writer travelled as a guest of Exodus Adventure Travels.