“Do these have cheese in them?” he asked.
She saw more tourists in snowmobile suits lingering by the cashier. Before they could make eye contact, she got out of there.
“I was thinking: Here we go again,” she said.
These were small impositions, but enough was enough. If you’re blond and therefore identifiable as a likely native of Rovaniemi, you can barely move around a supermarket during tourist season — and it’s all Santa’s fault.
Santa’s Hometown
A simple marketing idea, playing off a cherished childhood fantasy, has made a small city on the edge of the Arctic Circle almost unlivable for many people who live there. And it’s not just the needy tourists in the dairy or cracker aisle. It’s also the noisy Airbnbs, the escalating housing crunch, the sidewalks so crowded you can’t walk down them without bumping into people, and the car doors slamming in the middle of the night.
And it all started when the Nazis came to town.
Early in World War II, Finland allied with the Nazis, who built a big base in Rovaniemi, a Lapland railway hub. But by October 1944, the Nazis were losing and the Soviet Red Army was marching into Eastern Europe. As a little memento for the Finns and the Russians, the retreating German soldiers burned Rovaniemi to the ground.
That left a blank canvas. So after the war, Finland asked Alvar Aalto, the celebrated Finnish architect, to redesign the city. Aalto, known for his bold churches, concert halls and kitchen stools, came up with an idea: Why not remake the ruined town in the shape of a reindeer head, with the peripheral roads shooting out like antlers, to honor the area’s connection to reindeer herding?
