Christmas lights in Helsinki, FinlandJIP

Every year when Bridgemas is over, I will pack up a stash mince pies and Christmas puddings (just a selection of M&S’s best, mind you – my tastes are not very…singular) and export as much of Christmas foods to Finland as I can get away with pleading with Heathrow check-in personnel (“Please, sir, it’s food for my family”). Talk about the quite literal burden of growing up in two cultures: there’s my one-woman export business to satisfy the needs of my half-British-half-Finnish expat family, there’s the effort of cooking two full Christmas meals, as the Finnish and British Christmases are – very conveniently for achieving maximal food consumption – celebrated on different days, Christmas Eve and Day, respectively, and of course my childhood existential crisis about whether Father Christmas lives at Korvatunturi or the North Pole. ‘Exaggeration’, I hear you say, ‘how different can two Western countries be in their Christmas traditions?’ Nope, I’m not saying I’m juggling between, say, doing Hanukkah and Ramadan, but the differences are very real, and go beyond the sad fact that Christmas jumpers just aren’t a thing in Finland.

First off, the two countries differ in the very thing that Christmas is all about: commercialism and the presents brought to you by the Christmas protagonist, Father Christmas. Now, before you banish me from the UK (because in an increasingly hostile post-Brexit world, you might as well hate someone for their Father Christmas beliefs), I’d like to point out that I personally am a great believer in the fact that Father Christmas has set up camp at the North Pole. My Finnish childhood, however, was spent frowning upon my infidel friends who’d gone for the Finnish story – how could the poor souls have known better and seen past the great Finnish tourism conspiracy? – making Korvatunturi, a fell in Lapland, home to Father Christmas. Funnily enough, though, what most Finns don’t realise is that their beloved Korvatunturi is actually on the Russian side of the border; likewise, the winter wonderland tourists are flown to, Santa Claus Village, is hundreds of miles away from where Father Christmas is alleged to live. What more evidence do you need for Finland being involved in a major Santa conspiracy?

Finns can’t be blamed, though, for misplacing Father Christmas from the North Pole into their country: while in the Anglo-American tradition, Father Christmas makes his rounds at night when no one can see him to make most of whatever magic allows him to cover the whole world, in Finland he visits every home in person when everyone is still awake to the extent that they aren’t in a comatose  state from their Christmas meal.

Children will practice songs to perform for when Father Christmas comes around, and try to be on their very best behaviour (me with my total lack of any singing ability am very grateful to Father Christmas taking care of our expat hub in the down-the-chimey-at-night style). The same cannot be said for all the Santas venturing around town on Christmas eve: putting on a beard and a fake tummy is a great earning opportunity for many, creating a market for professional Father Christmases. Unfortunately, many of these alleged professionals tend to take in a bit too much of the Christmas spirit in liquid form, so that newspapers in the built-up to Christmas are rife with stories about boozy Santas. Ho-bloody-ho.

Given all the Father Christmas frivolity, you’ll be forgiven for thinking that Finnish Christmas is one of the merriest around. Quite frankly, it’s not. Now, Finnish culture is known as solemn and silent at best, and depressive and suicidally inclined at worst; anyone who knows anything about Nordic jokes will have witnessed the gloomy Finns being poked fun at by their rather more flamboyant Nordic neighbours. Christmas is no exception, despite being branded as a joyful feast. Finnish Christmas time starts officially at noon on Christmas Eve with a municipality official of the former capital Turku reading out the declaration of Christmas Peace. A tradition based on a piece of 13th century legislation, the declaration encourages people to behave in a respectful and peaceful manner, threatening them with extra harsh punishments for breaking the Peace. The reading is then followed by music, but – heaven forbid – not by carols but rather a patriotic hymn and a patriotic march, topped off with the national anthem. My Christmas wouldn’t feel like Christmas without the declaration, but watching it on TV does feel like watching a stately funeral in a rather more totalitarian society.

Actual carols do not fare much better with respect to joyfulness. A national favourite, the incredibly mournful Sparrow on Christmas Morning, often performed with backing up violins for the full tragic effect, tells the story of a starving sparrow in search of food on Christmas Eve. Happily enough, nosh is provided courtesy of a little girl; but a happy ending would not go down well with Finnish mentality, so that it is then revealed that the sparrow is actually the spirit of the girl’s dead brother. Top points for melancholy go to a different carol, though. Hei Tonttu-ukot Hyppikää (roughly Hey, elves, make merry), is set to a deceptively happy-clappy tune, and depicts an elf party. But just when you’re getting into boogie mood, the chorus kicks in with ‘Make merry now, for life is short, and even that is dark and miserable’. Ding-dong merrily on high indeed

But what is lacking in general merriment, is more than made up in food form. In all honesty, I feel like the preponderance of dried fruit in every single UK Christmas bake just excludes a sizeable proportion of the population who, very accurately, believe that baking goes with artery-clogging goodness like sugar and butter and semi-healthy ingredients like dried fruit. Not so in Finland: gingerbread comes in all imaginable shapes, including houses (unfortunately, mine have always been a bit more on the post-apocalyptic side of things), and, starting from November, is a staple of any occasion that can serve as an excuse to hand out free food. Puff pastry tarts with plum jam are the equivalent of mince pies, suitable also for the dried-fruit intolerant, while rice pudding topped with sugar, cinnamon, and fruit compote is so much creamier than your standard college rice pudding. And of course there’s Christmas chocolates, as in any self-respecting, Christmas-celebrating country; but in a nation with fewer people than in London, people tend to converge rather uniformly on which boxes of chocolates are the true classics. I recently bonded with a Finnish guy in Japan over our hatred of the pineapple marmalade chocolate in the No 1 classic chocolate set. Christmas really does bring people together.

It’s not all about sweets, mind you (although the sugar addict in me would be quite happy were things otherwise). I’m a firm believer that the Finnish Christmas meal could be made into a very successful national marketing strategy for being hip and trendy in dishing out a lot of very plant-based and whole-foody goodness. Yes, there’s the not-so-trendy issue of the huge ham, the cooking of which is a national tradition: think turkey-goes-pork, basically. But apart from that and a selection of fish, vegetarians, rejoice, for the rest is a very veggie feast. There is the trinity of bakes made with potato, swede, and the magical combination of carrot and rice pudding, each version baked to perfection in the oven and then left to rest overnight for optimal plant-based sweetness, while beetroot makes an appearance mixed with pear and apples. Believe me, there’s no need to go for tofurkey or any other meat look-alikes when feasting with Finns.

Going home for Christmas, I’m always a bit sad as I need to cherish my imported mince pies rather than going on a binge as I would in England, and as my Christmas jumper attracts weird looks rather than the appreciation its Primark-provided cheesiness deserves. But even so, Finnish Christmas is genuinely one of my favourite things about the country, ranging from overly depressive carol lyrics to culinary trend-setting and misinformed Father Christmas traditions. It’s just a shame that there is no hope of coming across a reindeer jumper-clad Colin Firth at a family gathering à la Bridget Jones. Oh well, as they say, life is dark and miserable – might as well make merry without Colin