When I was a child growing up in Sweden, “Lapland” meant magic – snow, huskies and reindeer. I was born in Göteborg, on Sweden’s west coast, and like countless families from across Europe, I made the northern trip one winter as a kid, when the promise of meeting Santa in his “homeland” was irresistible.

By the 1990s, northern Finland had been branded as the home of Santa Claus , complete with grottoes and hotels around the Arctic Circle near Rovaniemi. The legend had been carefully cultivated since the 1950s, when Eleanor Roosevelt’s postwar visit helped launch Finland’s Christmas -tourism industry. Today, hundreds of thousands of visitors arrive each year to meet “the real Santa” and buy a little piece of Arctic wonder. Only later did I realise how much of that wonder was constructed

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