You can fly to the official home of Santa Claus direct from Manchester - and even the harshest of blizzards won't cancel your flight

Boots crunching in the snow as you embrace the festive scenes of woolly hats, towering pine trees, mulled wine and the chance to meet Santa Claus himself are all in store on a wintery trip to Finland - and even the harshest of blizzards wouldn't put a stop to getting there.

Families and holidaymakers needn't fret about the plummeting temperatures in the Arctic Circle - which were a Baltic -23C when I visited in mid-November - or the likelihood of heavy ground snow cancelling their flights. In the last seven years, Rovaniemi Airport, in the heart of Lapland, has only been forced to close once.

Despite the plunging sub-zero conditions, it is always business as usual. I got to witness this first-hand for myself; learning how a highly skilled team of snow-plough professionals scale the runway continuously through day and night.

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Heavy duty machinery crushes up and sweeps away the white stuff, before it is then sucked up and fired away, meaning pilots can land safely in even the most treacherous of conditions. It was remarkable to watch, and felt like quite the contrast from here in the UK - when a dusting of snow or light drizzle seems to bring our infrastructure to a grinding halt.

On my visit in mid-November, my second packed out Finnair flight from Helsinki to Rovaniemi landed at 4pm, where the sky was already a deathly black due to the 'polar night' - the short five hours of daylight hours during the winter months, with the sun never rising above the horizon.

And, despite a foggy runway causing poor visibility, strong winds, and thick ice welcomed by