My name is Niko Kopalainen and I am in M8A. I grew up in Finland and moved to Ledbury about 3 years ago. I still have family in Finland, and I go over to visit them nearly every holiday.

I thought you might like to know a little about how we celebrate Christmas and New Year in Finland. In some ways it is quite similar to here, but we do have some differences which I will share with you.

Our Christmas school holidays are a lot shorter. We break up about December 23, and we go back to school on January 5. At that time of the year, there is only about 3 hours of daylight. The coldest temperature this winter over in Finland was minus 20 degrees, and we had about 40cms of snow.

Our Christmas meal is a bit different. We don’t have turkey but instead we eat ham and a very wide range of other foods such as salads and different breads. Some people like to eat moose but we don’t ever eat our reindeers!

We don’t have anything like Christmas pudding as we don’t eat a lot of sweet things. We drink home-made non-alcoholic beer, and even I got to try some!

Nearly everybody in Finland has a real Christmas tree, normally cut down from the nearby forest. We don’t tend to put lights on our trees, but we do decorate them. We exchange our Christmas presents on Christmas Eve.

I do enjoy celebrating Christmas in England but I prefer Finland because its what I am used to. Maybe one day I’ll get to like turkey!