Santa trips to Lapland
the Northern Lights at Rovaniemi, Finland
Where to go
Rovaniemi is the best known location; there is Santa's Post Office and Santa's village outside town. Close by is SantaPark, a theme park.
Kittila is more of a ski resort about an hour by car north of Rovaniemi and has more guaranteed snow.
Enontekio
How to get there
Plenty of day trip charter flights from Canterbury Travel and Transun. They do make for a long day as the flight is at least 3hrs each way; if you're leaving from a major airport rather than a provincial one then the extra hassle, taxi time etc make it significantly longer on board never mind the car park extra hassle. But it is convenient to have everything organised for you. The cost per person for a day trip is around £399 each including thermals. Overnight trips are also available.
It's often as cheap to arrange your own flights, car and hotels. You can end up with a 3 day trip for the price of a one long and rather exhausting day trip. But you'll have to do the organising yourself. In many ways it's better as some of the Santa villages tend to overflow with day trippers from lunchtime onwards and if you're already there you can beat the queue to see Santa! There's plenty of fun things to do in Rovaniemi - there's a ski slope which is useful for sliding down on plastic sit-on thingys even if you don't ski.
A good idea is to start with Expedia to get a rough idea of a DIY package price. Their current marketing says that you get a price reduction by adding your own flight, hotel and car bookings. Then see if there's a cheaper way of doing it.
Finnair will do the best connection from Heathrow via Helsinki to your chosen destination. Rovaniemi seems to be about £270 return and they code share with BA so you may end up on a BA aircraft anyway. The other airline flying Helsinki to Rovaniemi is Blue1 who are a subsidiary of SAS (around £80 return) so you could add that on to a Helsinki return from London. BA is around £220 return and Finnair £179 return so unless you have Air Miles/BA Miles to burn it's not that good a deal).
The Finnish low cost airlines have gone bust and there's no low cost operators from the UK to Helsinki. The only one is Ryanair to Tampere which isn't terribly useful as it's a long way south so you'd have to either drive 300ish miles to the Arctic Circle and back or get a bus/train to Helsinki then fly or go by train all the way to Rovaniemi.
There's several hotels in Rovaniemi; they naturally get booked early. Try the Scandic Hotel for direct bookings. Car hire isn't cheap at around £50/day; perhaps taxis would work out cheaper overall but a car is convenient for storing extra thermals etc.
One year we flew Heathrow via Stockholm to Lulea in Swedish Lapland which is 3-4 hours drive from Rovaniemi. The flight is around £215 return with SAS. We reckoned that the saving of £180 each over the direct day trip could be used to pay for a longer stay (hotels, car hire, food etc) and although the scenery isn't particularly inspiring, driving through pine trees in -21C on ice packed roads was much easier than one would imagine.
Tips
Tip 1: Digital camera batteries do not like subzero temperatures! You will find that if you're lucky you'll get one or two flash shots from your camera. I suggest either warming the batteries or do some research for an alternative. Keeping the batteries warm - given some imagination - isn't that difficult a job, but getting at them certainly is. If you are wearing numerous layers of ski clothing it's difficult enough answering calls of nature, never mind scrabbling around in your pants for camera batteries. And beware the risk of damage to your nether regions if you impact a tree etc with the batteries still being incubated!
Tip 2: Check the weather via the Rovaniemi webcam. It's not necessarily snowy in December.
Tip 3: Check the opening time of Santa's Village and get there early. If you beat the day tripper crowds you will have more fun. The reindeer man is open to negotiation for an hour's 'safari' through the woods - we paid around £80 I think which will keep his reindeer in hay for years.
Tip 4: At dusk, check for the Northern Lights. Wonderful.