The six best Christmas towns to visit around the world

Drive 15 minutes east from Alaska’s state capital Fairbanks and you’ll come across North Pole: a town with candy canes painted on the streets and festive parades throughout the summer months. It’s also home to the Santa Claus House gift shop and the world’s largest fibreglass Santa statue. Before you get carried away, it isn’t the actual North Pole – that’d be about 1,700 miles further north.

Rovaniemi calls itself the ‘Official Hometown of Santa Claus’ and it’s hard to argue with that. The main population centre of Finnish Lapland, Rovaniemi is best known for its spectacular Santa Claus Village amusement park, which features Santa himself (yes, the real one). That’s open year-round, but it’s basically always a white Christmas here – the edge of the Arctic Circle is just five miles away – so winter brings plenty of opportunities for sleigh rides and overnight stays in igloos.

Thanks to the charming timber of its traditional architecture style, quite a lot of the eastern French region of Alsace boasts seriously Christmassy vibes. But nowhere are those vibes quite as strong as in the town of Colmar, with its picture-perfect old town, narrow cobbled streets and slightly surreal neatness. It’s really not hard to imagine elves scuttling through the town’s gingerbread-house style streets. While it’s a merry old place year-round, Colmar is at its festive best during the wintertime.

Where better to start than somewhere literally named Santa Claus? This Indiana town is Christmas-themed for all 12 months of the year, with festive-themed stuff that ranges from a Santa Claus Museum and a novelty attraction called Santa’s Candy Castle to a post office that receives – and replies to – thousands of children’s letters to Santa every year. There are several places in the US named Santa Claus (the others are in Georgia and Arizona) but the one in Indiana is the Christmassiest by a country mile.

A fairytale-like enclave halfway between Frankfurt and Munich, Rothenburg ob der Tauber is one of Germany’s best-preserved walled towns – and it’s great for Christmas-themed holidays, no matter the season. Not just visually magic, Rothenburg is also home to the German Christmas Museum, which offers a comprehensive lowdown of the holiday’s history and traditions. And if you do visit around Yuletide, the annual Reiterlesmarkt is up there with Europe’s best Christmas markets.

Sunny Florida might not be the first place that comes to mind when you think of Christmas, but the southern US state has an entire town named after the holiday – and, as you can imagine, it’s pretty darn Christmassy. Although it has a tree and decorations up all year, Christmas, FL, gets particularly popular during the festive season. After all, what could be cooler than receiving a card with a Christmas postmark?