Dealing with Fear: Christmas Fantasization and the Heritage of Warfare in Finnish Lapland

This article examines the entanglement of Christmas tourism with World War II and Cold War heritage in Rovaniemi, Finnish Lapland, a landscape deeply shaped by warfare, militarization and geopolitical anxiety, yet globally marketed as the “official hometown of Santa Claus.” The paper introduces the concept of “heritage fantasization” to describe a mode of dealing with difficult pasts that operate through imaginative substitution rather than commemoration, negotiation and education. The focus here is on the Santa Claus Village and SantaPark, built respectively on a former German WWII car depot and inside a Cold War civil defense shelter. Instead of rendering violent histories visible or contested, these sites reorganize how heritage is felt; infrastructures of fear, surveillance and preparedness are transformed into environments of comfort, innocence and enchantment. Christmas emerges as a powerful cultural technology of affective management, enabling war-shaped landscapes to be experienced as neutral, timeless and safe. By analyzing how fear and anxiety are displaced rather than addressed, the paper contributes to heritage studies by identifying heritage fantasization as a distinct strategy through which societies render violent pasts invisible through incorporation in contexts of mass tourism and affective consumption.