In early December 2025 I headed to the North Pole with the family to see Santa in Lapland. This was by no means a photography trip, however, for obvious reasons, I had to take at least 1 camera.

For this trip I decided to go minimal and just took the little Fuji XT5 paired with the 23 mm f2 weather sealed lens. This combo is my daily carry set up that I generally grab and go with due to a couple of reasons:

small and easy to carry
weather resistant
simple and not too “photographer”

I knew that I was going to miss some photographic opportunities with just bringing this set up but as I said, this was a family trip 1st so that was an easy compromise.

We opted for a more rural and authentically Lapland version of this holiday, rather than the more commercial Santa’s Lapland with all the sparkly lights etc & I am so glad we did! This location at Lake Jeris in the Muornio region, felt extremely remote with nothing at all around the resort - exactly what we wanted, dark skies, clean air, silence and to experience the arctic circle as I hoped it would be….. Beautiful.

In the 4 days spent here we indulged in the various activities on offer:

Husky safari
Snow mobile
Reindeers

These activities were all brilliant and I have never felt cold like the day on the sledge with the huskies, -22 degrees Celsius and going 20mph into the wind was amazing but very quickly turned to extremely painful on the face whilst trying to enjoy the views.

One thing to note if you are heading here, there is no real food choices as such. You are served food at the designated meal times and whatever is cooked is all there is. So if you are a fussy eater (as I am), you may find yourself living off the very nice fresh bread for days. A small trade-off and it didn’t really matter too much in my opinion.

Lapland 2025