December 6 - Independence Day in Finland

Posted on December 6, 2020

This is an update of my 2009 post. It discusses all things Finnish on NORMAL years, not necessarily during a global pandemic!

Key points

This is the day that Finns celebrate their independence from Russia. Shops decorate with the blue and white of Finland’s flag, and bakeries sell cakes with blue and white frosting. Of course, there are flag-raisings, speeches, and visits to war memorials. One tradition doesn’t happen until evening, when many Finns light two candles in each window.

Finland is one of the Nordic countries, along with Iceland, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. Nordic means “northern lands,” and these countries are Europe’s most northern countries. The name Finland comes from Germanic languages in which Finn meant “hunter.”

Although a lot of people (including me!) casually refer to Finland as a Scandinavian country, it is not part of Scandinavia, which is a sub-set of Nordic countries that includes only Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. All the Nordic countries have off-center crosses (called, unsurprisingly, Nordic crosses) on their flags and share some aspects of culture and history.

Read some Finnish tales.

Here is some fun-and-Finnish Christmas stuff.

Finland is fun in Christmas because Lapland (the northernmost province of Finland) is the “official” home of Santa Claus! Its capital has a huge Santa Claus Village, and Lapland also offers reindeer farms, Santa-spotting snowmobile trips, and winter games such as an ice marathon, motor sledging competitions, and even reindeer sled races. (I wonder if these are the “reindeer games” that Rudolph wasn’t allowed to participate in.)

Santa Claus Village in Rovaniemi

Visitors can earn a reindeer driving license!

Santa Park is an underground cavern in Rovaniemi. There tourists can bake and decorate gingerbreads in the Gingerbread Kitchen, learn elf skills in the Elf School or make Christmas decorations in the Elf Workshop.

At the newest Elf Academy, student elves help answer some of
the hundreds of thousands of letters that arrive each year,
pack gifts, learn how to build a fire in the snow…and more!

Elsewhere in Lapland, tourists can take a troll tour in the Finnish forests.

Some tourists visiting Lapland in the winter stay at the Arctic Snow Hotel. The hotel, restaurant, church, and even a sauna (steam-bath) are all built of snow!

And there are loads of other frigid spots to tour or stay – everything from Snowman’s World to Snow Village, Glass Igloos to Snow Castle!

Cook using Finnish recipes. Oh! Here are recipes for special Christmas foods from Finland.

There’s a Venn about the Finns!
A Venn diagram is a graph that shows how things relate to each other. A typical Venn diagram looks like this:

This diagram shows that there is an overlap in the groups PETS and MAMMALS. It gives two example of creatures that are both pets and mammals. (Obviously, there are lots of other pets and mammals other than the ones listed. We shouldn’t ever look at a Venn diagram and assume that it is a comprehensive list of everything in each of the categories or overlapping sections.)

The Venn diagram below doesn’t show overlap. Instead it shows that one thing is a subset of another thing. Every single Scandinavian country is also a Nordic country, but there are two Nordic countries that are not in Scandinavia.
Can you think of some things to create Venn diagrams for? How about these ideas: Things that are white and Foods; Quadrilaterals, Rectangles, Rhombuses, and Diamonds; Names of Roman gods and Items in the Solar System.