Most kids learn that Santa Claus comes from the North Pole, but children in Scandinavia are taught he lives a bit further south.
Where exactly is a matter of much debate, with businesses in Finland, Sweden and Norway competing to cash in on the cachet that comes with claiming Santa's hometown.
Finnish children know his home to be in the mythological Korvatunturi (Ear mountain) in the Finnish part of Lapland, while Swedes say he hails from the small town of Mora. Norwegians claim he was born hundreds of years ago under a stone in Drobak - on the Oslo fjord.
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Danes, who enjoy milder and mostly snowless winters, teach their children that Santa's home is on the distant Arctic island of Greenland, a sparsely populated semi-autonomous Danish territory.
The biggest town in Finnish Lapland, Rovaniemi, has been dubbed the official hometown of Santa Claus and depends on the myth for a large part of its yearly tourism turnover of 210 million euros ($A316.5 million).
It attracts more than 300,000 visitors annually - five times the town's population.
"Santa Claus is a very important and known person globally ... and that's a good basis for us to build up this kind of business," mayor Esko Lotvonen said.
In the Nordic region, Santa doesn't clamber down chimneys but visits homes on Christmas Eve, meeting the children, or if he's too busy leaving behind a bag or basket of presents.
The Norwegian Santa in Drobak is too busy to talk as Christmas approaches. Instead, his cousin Tom picks up the phone but doesn't want to discuss business.
"It's time for Christmas cheer not for competition, but we can't be angry if our good colleagues in Sweden, Finland and Greenland think otherwise," he says.
"All Norwegian children know the real Santa lives here."
A group of schoolboys enjoying their Christmas break at a shopping mall in Helsinki are just as confident Santa is from Finland.
Six-year-old Matias, who doesn't want to give his family name, looks puzzled when asked the question, before blurting out: "He lives in Korvatunturi (Ear mountain), of course."
"And he's coming to see us again, he did last year," Matias says.
