Winter in the Christmas City

We welcomed the snow which came at Little Christmas, in the first week of Advent. The Finns, who were all hibernating, ceased to be depressed. So far, I had only hung around our apartment in Turku - which was paid for largely by the state - hearing the unending sci-fi whine of the pedestrian crossings below. I browsed the Web - connected by antique plugs to the Turku Telephone Company (Ministry of Transport and Communications). Now, it didn't seem so bad as I looked out at our empty suburb in a blizzard.

Finland has extreme seasons and the snow transformed it into a photographer's dream. At dawn the iced streets became rainbow-shot. I realised that this unknown country is a place of abundant, silent images. I travelled to Helsinki, walked between noble public buildings, along the esplanade of crystal trees. A black statue had one side whitened. A flag was frozen in midflap. In some deep psychological life, the reticent Finns think in pictures. Lying behind the bland, futuristic infrastructure of an intrusive society is primitive nature: what they call their culture. The stores had revealed their seasonal displays, and battery candles gleamed from the windows of empty offices along with the electric blue of computer monitors. I hadn't realised, but it was Independence Day, and the 80th year of freedom from hated Russia. Finns were at home sombrely contemplating the atrocities of the Civil War: I seemed to have the city to myself. The Russians had built Helsinki to be a more accessible capital during the 108-year occupation. Elegant, plain, with a 19th-century mannerly silence, it was a discreet delight tucked away up north. Once, when I was looking at the map, I noticed that the shape of Finland describes a woman, her back to Russia, her arm outstretched to the West. But decades of Balkan-style, inward-looking social democracy, with business closely linked to politics, have left the Finns ill-prepared for the new realties. Selling and advertising (to them, bragging) are anathema to them. This winter they were making a reluctant effort to hype their country as, after all, the home of Santa. I read that Turku had (guiltily) nominated itself "Christmas City of Finland". Our town is one of the last in Europe where the tradition of declaring Christmas Peace from the market square has survived - unbroken since the Middle Ages. I braced myself to enjoy "preparations, excitement and anticipation".

Jo would come in from her demanding day at the Swedish university. She was heavily pregnant, always tired, irritated when we couldn't keep to our evening-relax plan. We would lie down to watch swirling snowflakes through the door to the balcony, which we kept open because the central heating was so hot: heat and electricity were included in our rent, so we wasted them. She would fall asleep gripping my wrists.

Sometimes she shouted out. She visited fabulous psychological landscapes - white deserts littered with broken earthenware pots and rotting replicas of my head, and what not. I had my theories: she'd been taught in kindergarten to be practical, healthy, stoical, never to be special, to lose herself in conformity. She was overwhelmed by absence and robbed of the need to dream. We were going to spend Christmas with her family in Kemi, a tiny harbour on the border of Lapland, 100 kilometres from the Arctic Circle. I looked forward to skiing, to seeing wild lynx and gigantic elks. Her niece expected a punctual visit from the goatlike Christmas Man as he sleighed from the Ear Mountain past their door. She had e-mailed her request to his office at Rovaniemi's new Santaworld - just opened. Jo's mother doesn't recognise this more Americanised figure: as a child, she feared a satyr from the woods who annually came to feed the animals in their barn. On the whole, Finns retain the genuine, barer, more elegant original Christmas. Our fir tree was decorated only with cinnamon biscuits. Jo had made an Advent boat, though we kept forgetting each Sunday to light the white candles. Life was a bitch. Day and night had become poorly distinguished. I went for long stretches without eating: finding food was such a ordeal. I slipped on the ice and sprained my ankle. I became reliant on Jo. We quarrelled bitterly and at length over my "disgustingly filthy shoes", and so on to sanitised societies and the spiritual cost of egalitarianism.

Finally, she burst into tears and we made love with redoubled passion. We dozed off, waking up hungry late in the night. She ran on the ice to a shop while I resumed wearisome chores. She cooked and, finally relieved, we fell asleep in front of a log fire like cave people. December 13th was Lucia Day. Every year a girl is picked to be Lucia, riding in a horse-drawn, entinselled carriage, a crown of lengthy candles in her hair, waving and smiling for hours. A friend rang us (his name means "forest"). He was throwing a party at 18.00 sharp. It was already 17.30!

We'd be late! Jo applied a beauty emergency masque, and we split. Her student friends lived in luxury wooden houses. In one living-room they sat in a circle. They sipped glogg In silence. Cardboard elves and gnomes looked on. I babbled hysterically about the pent-up, boring, guilt-ridden Nordic countries. They took it masochistically. At long last, we got our coats and rushed home to relax.

I lost Jo in the crowds gathering after devotions outside Turku Cathedral.

A flourish of faulty brass notes and Lucia was off, preceded by a troupe of Santas, a carriage of Moomin people, a cartload of starboys shouldering lanterns and the Christmas Man/Goat in his veteran car. I spotted Jo and tried to hobble after her in the snow. Just as we passed a stained-glass window, I saw as though from an all-seeing eye the tableau we made, man and woman, cripple and expectant mother. Such a precise image of difficulty is depicted as an archetype on a Tarot card. Briefly, I was unsure who I was, but I accepted that we were enduring the Five of Pentacles . . .

WE ran from Kemi railway station to the car. In the 30 seconds we were out in the air, coins frosted over in my pocket. The winter solstice was approaching: it was midday and dark as night. Jo's taciturn father, Ilmari (which means "air"), pulled out. The road cut through a Lapland forest and he braked as a herd of reindeer crossed our route. On the steps of Jo's wooden house, candles were flickering to greet us. Our filthy shoes came off before we stepped on to reindeer rugs. Her mum simply nodded energetically at me. On the walls hung spears. I went and sat naked with Air in the family sauna. In front of a log fire, we ate in silence while the clock tocked. Dinner was a voluptuous mushroom picked that morning from the forest, which begins at the bottom of their garden where they had recently discovered bear prints. Her mother hung wreaths of fir twigs around the house. I knew what the Yuletide schedule would be - 24th: light candles on grandmother's grave; brief reading from St Mark, then Christmas dinner - tuck into a sizzling pig's leg, elk tongue, mountain cranberries, stewed fruit and "No 3 beers"; presents. And 25th: carols in the little Lutheran church.

Jo's niece visited and mistook me for the Christmas Goat. She was a little adult, like that awful Victorian drawing of Alice. She hoped to be given a book. Hans Christian Andersen? No, one about Mozambique to read through her rimless glasses. Thankfully, I hadn't been asked to dress up: Christmas Men, or Goats, could be hired from the Department of Gymnastics and Sport. We donned anoraks stuffed with down and went out to look for stray Lapps with huskies. We were humbled under the magnificence of black space and white uninhabited land. The silence was stunning. We heard a pile of snow drop off a ledge in the distance. It was 35. My breath was burning me and my tears were frozen. We were high as the most distant hills, above where trees can grow. In summer, the land is just swampy moors and rubble where Jo picks polar raspberries.

I was a fly on the top of the world. I had never seen stars so clear, hanging low like Christmas baubles. Jo informed me we had walked about a kilometre out on the frozen sea. I was suddenly dizzy. Then, all at once, pink and green zigzags spun across the vast canopy of Heaven. The Northern Lights. We came back, I downed a bottle of Finlandia and went to bed spinning. "He's kicking," said Jo beside me, pressing her belly. "I hope he doesn't come on Christmas Day. Jesus was unlucky."

"I love Christmas,' I was gibbering. "I believe in Christmas."

Before I fell asleep I was sure I heard wolves howling in the forest.

Philip MacCann was British Council writer-in-residence in Finland in 1995. He is the author of The Miracle Shed, (Faber and Faber).

Turku City Tourist information 0044 358 2 233 6366. Christmas City of Finland on the internet: www.christmascity.com. Rovaniemi Tourist Office: 358 16 346 270; internet: www.rovaniemi.fi

Arctic Centre, Rovaniemi: 358 16 317 840 Santa Claus's Workshop Village: 358 16 356 2096