A trip through Finland with my toddler, in deep winter

The cold wasted no time letting us know we’d crossed the Arctic Circle.

We’d just stepped off the bus at Santa Claus Village, a largely outdoor mall themed around the holiday gift-giver. It was midmorning in Rovaniemi, Finland, but the sky still looked like twilight, wrapped in blue-gray film. Dry snow crackled underfoot as we trudged into this year-round ode to Christmas.

My preschooler, Rory, and I posed next to an enormous thermometer that had plunged to a number so low it should have been fictional. Minutes later, he discovered an iced-over hill and began hurling himself down it headfirst, over and over, shrieking with joy until his eyelashes turned frosty.

We rushed inside a Marimekko outlet to thaw out beside racks of boldly patterned dresses. Rory whimpered while I blew hot air into his mittens, trying to revive his stiff little fingers.

The only other indoor option was a slow-moving line to meet Santa. We aren’t a Christmas-celebrating family, but I chose warmth over theology. The line snaked past towers of neatly wrapped but empty gift boxes that Rory was desperate to open. He squirmed and broke free, racing off and grabbing at whatever he could reach.

On our way out through the gift shop, he pocketed a refrigerator magnet, beaming when he showed it to me outside. “I got a present,” he said proudly. (We returned it.)

This was Finland with a 3-year-old: beautiful and brutal, often at the same time.

I hadn’t come for Santa so much as something more personal: a week away with my son that felt overdue.

As the daughter of a travel agent, some of my best childhood memories are one-on-one trips I took with my mom, little adventures with few distractions, no multitasking, and no choice but to pay attention to each other. Now with kids of my own, home life felt like all distractions — me juggling logistics and chores while Rory built Magna-Tile castles or rewatched episodes of “Helper Cars.” Travel, I hoped, could help.

With Finland, I realized I’d chosen the coldest, darkest place we could reasonably reach, all to try to bring us closer.

Rory slept through the transatlantic flight, and we were greeted in the Helsinki airport by free-to-use strollers, a lifesaver for getting through customs.

Right away, we found the city disarmingly child-friendly. Play spaces appeared exactly where we needed them — in cafes, at the children’s art museum Annantalo, and occupying half a floor of the soaring central library Oodi.

Despite my worries about solo travel with a slippery toddler — this is a kid who grins wickedly before pressing automatic door buttons and dashing into the street — I felt more capable on this trip. When he darted under airport stanchions and ran circles past security agents, I didn’t panic.

“It really is so different when it’s just us,” I wrote to my spouse on Day 2. “His mischievousness is more adorable than threatening.”

Leaving Helsinki, we boarded the overnight Santa Claus Express train to Lapland. We slept in a cabin barely bigger than our suitcases, Rory delighted by the bottom bunk, me on the top, sneezing distance from the ceiling.

By sunrise, we were at Apukka Resort, where the grounds looked like a postcard: peach-colored sky, frost-dusted trees, and rows of little cabins with glass roofs for viewing the northern lights from bed. I pulled Rory around the resort on a sled until my glasses glazed with ice.

Outfitted in full-body gear, we boarded the shuttle to Santa Claus Village. The attempted theft in Santa’s workshop behind us, we retreated to a hut warmed by an open fire, where a woman tended salmon on the grill. Rory was transfixed. Between the warmth and the buttery fish, I counted lunch as a win.

That was the night the sauna carriage arrived. Finland is the sauna capital of the world, but it’s not a ritual easily undertaken with a 3-year-old. I booked Apukka’s mobile sauna for after Rory was asleep, knowing this would likely be my only chance.

At 10 p.m., a squat wooden tube on skis pulled up outside, glowing from within. An attendant showed me how to stoke the fire and handed me a robe and slippers, explaining that if I got too hot, I could step outside and roll in the snowbanks. Then he left me alone.

My mind replayed the night: the restaurant, the looks, the bribe. I opened the Good Inside app from parenting expert Becky Kennedy, looking for anything that might help me do better the next day.

One idea stayed with me: Connect first.

Kids, Kennedy said, are more likely to cooperate when they feel like you’re on the same team. So much of traveling with young kids amounts to a steady stream of instructions: Stand here, hold my hand, put this on, wait for me. Maybe all my son needed was simple eye-level acknowledgment that being cold and tired and small in an unfamiliar place is hard.

I wanted to run inside and wake my peacefully sleeping toddler. But even if I wasn’t parent of the year, I knew better.

By breakfast, I was the one who adapted. Instead of rushing us out the door, I followed Rory back under his blanket to play “robot monster” — a game with no rules and no clear ending. We laughed and burrowed and forgot about any schedule.

In the days that followed, he set the pace, and we lingered where he wanted — climbing into a massive forestry machine at the science center, trying (and failing) to catch a fish on a frozen lake, warming our hands over a fire. On our final morning, we joined a group activity that involved tubing, mushing with a team of huskies and visiting a reindeer farm. As fat flakes of snow fell in slow motion, Rory showed me how he tenderly fed lichen to the animals. For once, I wasn’t planning our next move.

Back in the airport for our connection home, he made one last sprint away from me, then turned back, slipping his hand into mine.