Wild spirit of Christmas

"We open every one and look inside," says Auli Sihvo, a Finnish postal employee whose work attire includes an elf's hat. "I get to eat the chocolates." She says Santa replies each year to about 40,000 of the letters, although a form can be filled out and for €7 ($9.50) he posts a letter in one of 11 languages that will be received before the big day.

I pay €3 instead for a pack of 30 emptied envelopes, received by Santa and sold now to raise funds for UNICEF. My heart is gladdened by the diligent handwriting on each envelope and their geographical fantasies. "Father Christmas, North Pole, Greenland", one is addressed. Others are directed to "Father Christmas, Top of Earth" (with a drawn map), or to "Santa's Grotto, Reindeerland". One from Japan simply reads: "Finland, By Air Mail".

One day I'm hanging washing out on the Hills Hoist and mopping the kitchen floor. Barely 36 hours later, having crossed the equator and seven time zones, I'm standing on the Arctic Circle on the lip of Lapland, meeting Santa and his helpers. Scandinavia's great frosted crown is said to mean "far away" in the Lappish tongue but in the geography of the mind it might as well be "fairy wonderland".

High latitudes and cold places have this effect on the imagination. I think often of flights of fancy, of the mystique of cold places, of the magic of a white winter. It's as if all my Christmases have come at once.

I'm not the only one smitten by the novelty. "I just met Santa, which is pretty exciting," Jon Varova, 33, of Canberra, says. He's the captain of the Australian Wombats dodgeball team, fresh from the world championships in Las Vegas and now on a 10-week world trip, flying Qantas with a code-share Finnair stopover in Helsinki. A gentle bull of a man, he wears a Wests Tigers fleece when we bump into each other in a gift shop, where I'm intrigued by the local produce - namely, tins of elk and bear.

Varova has flown to Rovaniemi, the capital of Lapland, for the day and caught a taxi to the nearby Santa Claus Village because of a universal desire for yuletide faith and a common longing to shop for souvenirs: "I've got a whole bunch of presents to take home for the kids," he says. "They'll never believe who I met."

Digital proof costs €49 for a USB memory stick of photos recording the priceless encounter. Santa's shop accepts all credit cards. I use mine to buy a snow dome. About 150 chartered Santa flights arrive on the eve of each Christmas season at Rovaniemi - where the Arctic Circle crosses the airport's runway - mostly from western Europe and filled with children and their parents. "It's like a fairytale for them, a once-in-a-lifetime experience," a local tourist operator says. "I don't remember any Christmas when there hasn't been snow."

For four days, travelling alone into the ice-cold expanses of Lappi - as the Finns call Lapland, the country's northernmost province - I succumb to Coleridge's "suspension of disbelief". I'm struck by my place in the world and feel giddy at being so high on the map, in bear country, above Iceland, the Yukon, Hudson Bay, Mongolia and almost all the world's civilisation. Road signs warn of elk; the hire-car attendant of other hazards. "Reindeers are very stubborn," he says. "In winter they lick the salt on the road. You have to stop and wait."

Lucky I'm in no hurry. By law, I drive with headlights on and a dashboard light winks and chimes whenever the outside temperature dips to less than 3 degrees. A boy on a bike rides by clutching an ice-hockey stick.

My route follows loosely the Finnmark path, mapped in 1598 from the Gulf of Bothnia to the Arctic Ocean, through forests of silver birch that now turn golden, into the heart of a cultural region known for reindeer husbandry. The beasts graze at dusk by the road - all skinny legs and felt antlers and looking every bit like Christmas decorations. I pass timber mills, farm buildings, signs for smoked fish. The car radio plays Men at Work's Down Under. I'm heading up instead, into the lost world of the once-nomadic Sami people - hunters and herders, fishers and berry gatherers - a minority group pushed north since the Stone Age into the shapeless state of Lapland, a great Arctic basin overlapping Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia.

"We are Arctic people," says the warm-hearted Irene Kangasniemi, 51, who I meet in her pine-log home in birch woods near Rovaniemi and who promptly serves me reindeer and juniper-berry soup with unleavened Lappish bread. "In summer we make love and fishing. In winter, we not fishing so much."

Irene and her husband, Ari, are my entree to Lappish lore. Her ancestry is in Russian Lapland; he's a Sami from the north. We talk about moose hunting, blueberry picking, the supermarket price of reindeer meat, fish-soup recipes, her deep-freeze supplies, winter's dry cold (it reached minus 47.5 degrees in January 1999) and the wood stove in their home. "I use it every day in winter," she says. "It's like a ceremony when I'm warming this oven."

The two of them make Lappish handicrafts from reindeer antler, leather and wood in a home workshop and welcome visitors to their kitchen for authentic Lappish cooking. "When we are visiting places we don't bring flowers, we bring food," Irene says. I'm drinking a liquor distilled from lingonberries and feasting on smoked reindeer and a baked pudding of cloudberries, cheese, cream and sugar.

Dorothea Mackellar's homesick bush poetry has engendered a national landscape tradition for many Australians, her verse providing succinct recognition of a "sunburnt country, a land of sweeping plains". The idea that in the earth is identity seems intuitive in this part of the world, a primeval landscape long ago scoured by ice and now pooled in water and carpeted with a great boreal forest of pines, birches and spruces.

"He is a nature man," Irene says of her husband. "He wants to hunt and fish and collect food for winter." From the outside it seems a simpler, truer life of communion with the natural world. I'm told that mystics call the hum of the Lapland wind the singing of the universe, the music of the spheres, and I don't doubt it.

On the road I am sidetracked by these simple joys. I explore the autumnal hues of peat bogs, look for snow owls, get waylaid by the agreeable aesthetics of woodpiles and pull over at a glass igloo. At Ivalo, a town known mostly for having Finland's northernmost airport, I round a roundabout twice just to see again a road sign pointing to Murmansk, 303 kilometres away.

"It's so out of the way," says Kathy Johns, a sixtysomething Gold Coast retiree who, with her husband Bruce, a former concrete-truck driver, I find halfway through their 30-day loop of Scandinavia. "We're lucky because we've had a good look around the world but we've never seen anything like this."

Inari is a pinprick on the map (population: about 500) beside a lake named the "Sami Sea" because of its sheer size, where December temperatures average an icy minus 5.4 degrees to minus 13.9 degrees. It's here that I sit unknowingly beside the travellers from the Gold Coast. There's no escaping your kith. Not even in Lapland.

We meet in the restaurant of a hotel built first by the Finnish Tourist Association in 1937 for foreign fly-fishermen (touring Germans later razed it and most other Lapland buildings during their retreat of 1944-45), overlooking rapids on the fast-running Juutua River. The two retirees are glued to a TV screen streaming live underwater footage from the torrent, featuring swim-on cameos by brown trout. "This one is maybe 3.5 kilos," the waiter says. "Average size is pretty nice here. If you're lucky you can get up to 10 kilos."

We share travel stories. "Bruce stood with a foot on either side of the Arctic Circle," Kathy says. Bruce says: "Everybody's very obliging and they're so good with languages."

The couple spend several months each year touring Australia in a Swagman motor home but on this trip they've caught a train from Copenhagen to Stockholm, a ferry to Helsinki, a train to Rovaniemi and a bus to Inari. Next stop is the Barents Sea, then a boat to Bergen, train to Oslo and a flight back to Copenhagen.

"If we can fit it in next year, we want to do Beijing to Moscow by train," Bruce says.

I'm plotting a return to Lapland in the spring, some day, to cross-country ski to the Russian border through one of Europe's last great wild places. "Hikers see brown bears very seldom," reassures Maria Tolli, 34, a guide who takes me Nordic walking with poles for a day into Urho Kekkonen National Park.

The landscape is preternaturally beautiful in its windswept ruggedness, with low hills called fells - an Icelandic term for an open mountainside - matted with an alpine heath of ripe berries that we stop and graze on, among lemmings, reindeer and elusive wolverines. A scrim of mist lifts and reveals glacial-smoothed ridges that run all the way to the border.

All I'd need is a map, compass, rucksack, pair of skis and a willing accomplice. Maybe when I retire I will do this: come back and spend a week making tracks between log cabins.

Tolli encourages my wanderlust. She has skied the European Alps but says it's a whole other world in the Lapland wilderness on spring snow with the big sky above. "It's something beautiful," she says. "You have to feel it."

Dugald Jellie travelled courtesy of Finnair and the Finnish Tourist Board.

FAST FACTS

Getting there

Finnair has a fare to Rovaniemi from Sydney and Melbourne for about $1720 low-season return, including tax. Fly Qantas to Singapore (about 8hr), then Finnair to Helsinki (12hr 30min), then to Rovaniemi (80min); see finnair.com. This fare allows you to fly via a number of Asian cities with oneworld partner airlines and return from Ivalo, for example. There are day and night trains from Helsinki to Rovaniemi (about 10hr). It's about five minutes by cab from Rovaniemi Airport to the popular Santa Claus Village.

When to go

December is high season, when the Arctic is blanketed in snow, the temperature averages minus 13.5 degrees and package family tours arrive for Yuletide fun, reindeer sleigh safaris, views of the northern lights and an audience with Santa. Pack woollens and book a log cabin for next year. Spring (March-April) is the best time for Lapland skiing because the days are longer and warmer. Summer brings the midnight sun (it doesn't set in Inari between May 22 and July 22) but also the rakka season, when there are swarms of biting insects. I visit in September — the autumn ruska — when leaves turn gold and the weather is ideal for hiking.

Staying there

Fell Centre Kiilopaa has a range of log cabins, apartments, houses, a hostel and hotel of a pleasingly simple 1960s Finnish design and ideally located for enjoying hiking and cross-country ski trails in the adjoining Urho Kekkonen National Park. A smoke sauna is lit three times a week and ice swimming is free. Rooms cost from €36 ($49) a person a night, including breakfast; see kiilopaa.fi.

The family-run Hotel Kultahovi Inari, rebuilt in 1956 beside the Juutuanjoki rapids, is another standout option for its classically sparse Scandinavian design. The in-house restaurant — with trout cam — specialises in locally sourced ingredients; expect a lot of reindeer, whitefish, forest mushrooms and wild berries; see hotelkultahovi.fi.

For a novel night, bed down in the glass igloos at Kakslauttanen, which also has a selection of wonderfully romantic log cabins ideal for a winter retreat. The resort has an ice chapel for white weddings; see kakslauttanen.fi.

More information

See laplandfinland.com; visitrovaniemi.fi; visitfinland.com.