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Finland in a nutshell: eight easy questions about the essentials. Everyone can join in, whatever your age, and learn something new along the way.
Snowshoe beginner 0–3 · Forest berry picker 4–6 · True Finland fan 7–8
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Finns call their flag siniristilippu, which means 'blue cross flag', and tradition says the design goes back to the poet Zachris Topelius, around 1860. The blue is said to stand for the sky and the country's many lakes, and the white for the snow that covers the land in winter.
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Sauna is a Finnish word, and Finns even have a special word, löyly, for the hot steam that rises when water is thrown on the stones. In Swedish, by the way, a sauna is called a bastu, and in 2020 Finnish sauna culture was added to UNESCO's list of the world's cultural heritage.
Photo: Bleiglass~enwiki, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.
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Reindeer herding takes place across about a third of Finland, mostly in Lapland, by both Sámi and Finnish herders. In the long, dark winter, a layer at the back of a reindeer's eyes changes from gold to blue, which helps it see in the dim light.
Photo: Sergey.vlad.popov, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
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Finland's national ice hockey team is nicknamed Leijonat, 'the Lions', and the whole country follows its big games. The team won its first world title in 1995 and its first Olympic gold medal in 2022, after many years of coming close.
Photo: Lumijaguaari, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.
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About one in twenty Finns grows up speaking Swedish, and on the Åland Islands it is the only official language. Finnish itself is not related to Swedish at all: its close relatives include Estonian and Karelian, and it is a distant cousin of Hungarian.
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Long ago, Finns thought it was unwise to say the bear's real name out loud, so they used nicknames such as mesikämmen, 'honey paw'. Even karhu, today's everyday Finnish word for bear, began as such a nickname: it comes from a word for 'rough', after the bear's coarse fur.
Photo: Yathin S Krishnappa, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.
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The box comes with a small mattress, so many Finnish babies take their first naps in it. Finland has handed out these boxes since 1938, and besides clothes and a snowsuit they hold things like a toothbrush, a hairbrush and a picture book.
Photo: Miika Niemelä from Helsinki, Finland, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.
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Rovaniemi was declared an official hometown of Santa Claus in 1980, and at Santa Claus Village, close to the Arctic Circle, visitors can drop in at Santa's office for a chat. In Finnish he is called Joulupukki, which means 'Christmas goat', and he receives more than half a million letters a year from all over the world.
Photo: Anssi Koskinen, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.
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