While one 65DN reporter went to Ivalo, Antje Neumann went further north to experience a third version of Nordic Christmas: a remote cabin during polar night with nothing but snow, ice, and silence around, over 300 km north of the Arctic Circle.
Wake up! It’s 11 o’clock already and time for breakfast!” Opening my eyes I glimpse a chaos of foodstuffs, candles, and paper for unpacked Christmas parcels. Behind all this, my fiancé Usko stands with two cups of steaming coffee in his hands. “Great service!” his partner replies.
I get up slowly, feeling the cold wooden boards under my bare feet and notice to my displeasure that I have to pee before breakfast. It’s at least -20 degrees Celsius outside and the toilet isn’t a WC but a simple shithouse in the garden.
Flashing Usko a constrained smile, I prepare myself for a medium Arctic expedition. Thick woollen socks preceed two pairs of trousers; a thick, down jacket; my warmest hat and winter boots. And off I go into the snow.
For having to pee in the cold, I blame Christiane Ritter, an Austrian woman who in her book A Woman in the Polar Night spent a whole year in Spitsbergen in the 1930s, mostly in a tiny hunter’s hut with only the light of petroleum lamps to break up a five-month darkness.
A painter, Ritter describes the light of the Arctic winter in extraordinary detail, from the magical bright light of the moon flooding over vast snow to a twilight that makes you hallucinate, or the light of the distant sun illuminating the mountains in unearthly colours.
Being a nature and photography enthusiast, I have to experience this sort of thing for myself.
Base camp
However, not living in Austria but in Oulu, I have the luxury of not flying all the way to Spitsbergen, a Norwegian island. Instead I drive 700 km to the northernmost tip of Finland. “Between mid December and mid January, the sun doesn’t rise at all in Northern Lapland,” I read. This makes the Lapland Polar night four months shorter than in Spitsbergen, but darkness is darkness, I muse. And convince my fiancé to spend our Christmas in Jänisjärvi, Lake of the Rabbit.
And I’m ready for my own mini version of absolute urinary solitude when I hit the technical snag.
December on Jänisjärvi, open the door in the morning to go pee and you’re confronted with a light blue landscape with snow-covered birches. You expect total darkness because the sun is hiding below the horizon, but light refracts in the atmosphere like light before sunrise. The sun seems higher than it is in the same way twilight is longer in the north than close to the equator.
Staying in Jänisjärvi looking for absolute polar night, you discover a dreadful truth: there is no such thing in Finland. The tourist brochures are telling a little fib.
Look it up and you’ll find polar night defined as the period of darkness before sunset and after twilight, occurring at its southernmost at 72 degrees north, meaning that even the most northern tip of Finland is still about two degrees too south. Ritter, it turns out, was at 79 degrees.
At the tip of Finland, what you get might better be called polar twilight.
Twilight at midday
For visitors to Jänisjärvi who trusted the literature however, it’s too late to split hours. And staying here, you wouldn’t want to. It’s absolutely silent on the lake: no animals, no sounds of civilisation: only the crunch of our skis on the snow. To the south the sky holds yellows and reds from a sun that can only be seen fully in Rovaniemi, a full 300 km away.
In the twilight, you can see without problems. The northern half of the sky is deep blue. A pale half moon hangs over the forest. Photography is challenging and a tripod is absolutely necessary. At 2 pm the sky turns red and twilight turns to dark. Navigation is still possible, however: every detail of the landscape is visible in the light of the moon. Thousands of stars flicker above, more than above Oulu with all its city lamps.
The temperature sinks lower and lower and my eyelashes droop from a covering of ice. We don’t speak, feeling a deep peace.
Back in the cabin, Usko sets off to chop wood and fetch water from the hole in the lake ice, to prepare a traditional sauna with subsequent snow bath. I start on a typical German Christmas meal: roast duck, red cabbage, potatoes, and red wine from Rheinhessen.
I learn two lessons from this holiday. One, be careful with the term ‘polar night’ in Finland. Two, if you’re looking for calm and relaxation, it’s hard to knock Christmas in a remote cabin in the wilderness.
Please keep the topic of messages relevant to the subject of the article.
