ROVANIEMI, Finland – Here in Santa Claus Village, near the Arctic Circle, is the self-anointed “Official Santa,” a Finn who refuses to give his real name, insisting he is actually Mr. Claus.
A couple of hundred yards away in a competing venue is Second Santa, whose real name is Kari Eskeli, 65, also a Finn. As soon as Christmas is over, he goes back home to the warmth of the Spanish Canary Islands. “I can’t wait,” he chuckles at the end of a long recent day of receiving supplicants. “Ho ho ho.”
And then there’s Evil Santa, as he calls himself, an outspoken raconteur holding forth in his son’s busy souvenir shop just downstairs from Official Santa’s grotto.
“This place is exploding now; it’s really taking off,” says Wolfgang Kassik, an Austrian business consultant with a long gray, all-natural beard, who is married to a Finn. “Personally, though, I don’t like kids.”
That could be a problem.