It’s settled: Santa lives Rovaniemi

The European Union has considered the evidence and settled one of the great unresolved questions of the North. Santa Claus lives in Rovaniemi.

At long last, the EU Intellectual Property Office ruled that the city in Finnish Lapland can hold onto “The Official Hometown of Santa Claus,” the trademark it has owned since 2009, rejecting a cancellation request from a Dutch freelance journalist who had pointed out, reasonably enough, that a man who does not exist can live wherever he likes.

That journalist is Lex Boon, who is finishing a Dutch-language book on the commercial machinery of Christmas and filed the challenge as part of the reporting. He has been to Rovaniemi three times. Last summer he also hiked up Korvatunturi, the remote fell on the Russian border where Finnish children are told Santa actually lives, which is either a devastating piece of evidence or exactly the sort of thing Rovaniemi has an answer for. The city’s position, roughly, is that Santa maintains a workshop village on the Arctic Circle to receive visitors and guards his real address jealously.

Boon has been consistent that none of this was personal. He was not going after Santa. He was not going after Rovaniemi. He simply thought an imaginary figure belongs to everyone, and that the mark should never have cleared the bar for registration in the first place.

Rovaniemi did not find this funny. The city, home to about 66,000 people and a Christmas tourism economy that comfortably outnumbers them, hired the Helsinki law firm Berggren, which informed the agency that the whole exercise was a waste of everyone’s resources. Boon’s own filing included, among other exhibits, a Tripadvisor review reporting that a visitor had encountered two different Santas at Santa Claus Village, offered as proof that the trademark is misleading.

The agency sided with the city and found no grounds to cancel, which means the good people of Rovaniemi can enjoy a jolly time.