Finnish travel group brings teddy bears to Santa

ROVANIEMI, Finland — A Finnish company is offering teddy-bear owners a chance to send the stuffed animals on their own customer-designed adventures to the Arctic Circle to meet Santa Claus. For between $118 and $172, Teddy Tours Lapland poses teddy bears on Arctic safari rides on horseback, walks in the snow and campfire picnics. They also get to ride Santa's sleigh and feed his reindeers. "We get teddies from all over the world; Japan, England, Germany," said tour guide Marja Ylinampa, who founded the company in 2009 after reading about Teddy Tours Berlin, a company that takes teddies around the German capital. The "tours" in Rovaniemi, the capital of Finnish Lapland, take an average of about two weeks before the teddy bear is returned to its owner with photos and a DVD of its adventures. "The teddies really like it here because we have Santa Claus here. And we have the snow, reindeers and nature," she said, while touring around Nalle, a teddy bear that belongs to a group of kindergarten children in Espoo in southern Finland. So far, some 50 teddy bears have been on the tour, with most of them coming from Finland, Japan and Germany.—AP