It's coming up to that time of year again. So what does the over-indulgent parent or grandparent give to the child who has everything? If your suggestions of grottoes and pantos are greeted with infant scorn, fear not. You can restore your reputation for imaginative treats in one blow. Take the little darlings to meet the real Father Christmas. In Lapland.

It is night-time when you arrive at Rovaniemi, which sits precisely on the Finnish Arctic Circle. And it continues to be night-time for most of your stay. Daylight in December starts at around 10am and finishes at 2.30pm. In between a light veil of greyness is cast over a world of snow and pine and birch, creating a white-green monochrome where reindeer outnumber people at more than two to one.

Fairytale on ice
Canterbury Travel, who organise the search for Santa Claus, manage to turn Lapland into an Arctic theme park where you're likely to run into elves in the forest wearing jingling jesters' hats and snow queens in glittering medieval gowns. These are just the trailers building up to the main feature - meeting Santa - but this is a fairytale atmosphere with a cosy English feel to it (nothing grim or Grimm here).

The next few days are spent in a hectic search for Santa, which provides the opportunity for trying out all kinds of curious Arctic transport. There were snowmobiles, skis, reindeer sleighs, snowshoes, husky sleighs and a troika pulled at dashing speed by a pair of horses.

My hopes of communing with primeval nature were at their highest at the prospect of the reindeer safari. Wrapped in reindeer furs in the silent, empty forest, the only sounds were the creak of wood on snow and leather on fur. Romantic notions are soon dispelled, though, when you have a five-year-old next to you gleefully shouting, 'Mummy, quick, let me take a photo. The reindeer's doing a poo.' On our return, not perhaps surprisingly, 50 per cent of our photos seemed to feature reindeer bottoms.

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The Lapland of luxury