Where I want to spend Christmas someday

The Inuit people say that if you watch too much of this, you will eventually go mad, yet I don’t know anybody who doesn’t want to see it at least once in their lifetime, or travelers who don’t have it on their bucket lists.

Even with the promise of getting unhinged if you somehow lucked out, the Inuits (Eskimos) also hold the notion that this natural phenomenon is “caused by the souls of dead people playing celestial football with the skull of a walrus.”

Who wouldn’t want to look up and see the Aurora Borealis or the Northern Lights streaking up in the clear night skies?

This month, this year, is supposed to have the best light show — better than last year’s and the best in an 11-year cycle when intense solar flares kick up the celestial light display.

According to NASA, the top places for watching the Aurora Borealis are between 66 and 69 degrees north of the equator — in the few countries with parts that fall under the Arctic Circle, such as the US and Canada, Greenland, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Russia.

There is something about the Aurora Borealis that has always fascinated me apart from the lights. It is the difficulty of seeing it — that to one living on the other side of the world, where temperatures average 30 degrees Celsius all year round, it means traveling great distances to some of the coldest, most isolated places on the earth for a chance to see it in the winter months.

No promises, just a  chance.

It’s like a relationship without commitment. So you travel a full day, you sit in the cold under the dark night sky and you wait. And you wait some more till you can’t feel your nose anymore and then you’re no longer sure if you still have a nose. You realize that it is not so much about you finding the Aurora Borealis, it is about whether it wants to show itself to you.  

I was once in the Arctic Circle. There was no light show in a place where there should have been.

There was, however, an unforgettable experience getting to our destination, riding through the Swedish Lapland on snowmobiles to get to Jukkasjärvi in Kiruna, Norbotten County.

Until 2010, Jukkasjärvi had fewer than a thousand people — 548, in fact.

That was 12  years ago. It was March but it felt like Christmas to me. Everything was white. Everything was cold. We stopped by a teepee to eat piping hot soup and bread for lunch. We tumbled from our snowmobiles, lost control of the handles and tangled their skis into each other, got stuck in several inches of snow and generally slowed the convoy down.

Upon reaching Jukkasjärvi, I sat in a wooden lodge with two other girls and we were discussing whether to go inside our hotel or not. We were already freezing all day and sleeping in the Ice Hotel where the temperature was colder than outside seemed foolish. Then we snapped out of it — it would have been more than foolish if we chose to stay in the “normal” hotel. So we bundled up in our snowsuits, found our room and zipped up in our sleeping bags on top of ice beds.

The next morning it felt stupid to me that we even had that discussion.

In my mind, this experience — and nearly not going through with it — is a reminder of how not to agonize over the practicalities of things I want to see and do, of ticking off little boxes in my head.

It’s the same with the Aurora Borealis — how I would have wanted to see it this Christmas — best show in 11 years, say the scientists! — but it ain’t happening…yet.

I read about a place where you can see the Northern Lights: in Saariselkä in the Finnish Lapland. It is an area that has numerous ski resorts, log cabins and other kinds of accommodations, but what piqued my interest is the Igloo Village of Hotel Kakslauttanen.

Located 250 kilometers above the Arctic Circle in Finland there is a small airport nearby (it is 1,085 kilometers from Helsinki) and bus services to take people there.

I can imagine a Christmas or any other time  in winter where I would be watching an auroral substorm from inside a glass igloo and not having to freeze to death.

It would be a pretty cool way to spend the night, wouldn’t it — watching this phenomenon, named after the Roman goddess of dawn and the Greek name for the north wind, brought about by colliding particles of the sun and the earth.

I know the Northern Lights will stay on my bucket list, and hopefully, not or long.