WHEN I was a kid I used to love Easter, mainly because some huge rabbit came and left chocolate eggs all over our garden for my sisters and I to find. I would hoard mine for months like an eight-year-old version of Scrooge, jealously guarding them from chocolate thieves. I would peel off the wrappers bit by bit, nibbling 5 millimetres a day so that my stash would run out the day before Easter the next year.

That was then and this is now, which unfortunately means that as far as I’m concerned Easter has all the allure of a cold bath in November. Of all the holidays in the year this is the one that’s really for kids, with children receiving the overwhelming majority of chocolate eggs. Adults might occasionally get one of those...

Pronounce the name of this product in and the last thing you’d think of would be that it’s something consumable rather than some kind of incarnation of evil. Luckily it’s also known as “wheat gluten” or “wheat meat”.

As the later names suggests, seitan is made from the gluten of wheat. It is an alternative high-protein meat substitute to soybean products like tofu, and it’s widely used in vegetarian and Asian cooking. In fact, seitan resembles meat in texture and aesthetics to such extent, that some vegetarians avoid it for that very reason.

TODAY’S theatre-goers have grown used to (some even weary of) multimedia experiments and envelope-pushing productions. Younger viewers should be no exception. Catering to that demand, Danish art collaboration Graense-Loes brings their production Fucking Alone to Helsinki for the Bravo! International Theatre Festival for Children and Youth.

Graense-Loes’ award-winning audiovisual performance grasps the difficult topic of human loneliness and focuses on people using technology instead of having real world contacts. Fucking Alone is described as a multimedia puppet theatre, with video projections and virtual media taking the stage as co-actors. The performance has gained international accolades, and teenagers and adults alike have enjoyed its modern object theatre and thought-provoking subject.

Learning the Finnish they don’t teach in school

Kaamos (noun)

English equivalent: Polar night.

Example of usage:

”Kaamos voi aiheuttaa kaamosmasennusta niin ihmisillä kuin eläimillä. Oireita ovat mm. unihäiriöt, ylensyönti, seksuaalinen taantuminen ja erakoituminen. Kaamoksesta voi selvitä matkustamalla ulkomaille.” (”Kaamos can cause depression in people as well as animals. Symptoms include e.g. sleep deprivation, loss of sexual appetite and becoming a hermit. Kaamos can be survived by travelling overseas. “)

Will they ever come true in this wretched world?

“Freedom for woman! Freedom of action, freedom of thought! Our spiritual strength is disheartened by the weight of old, stiffened shapes and customs. The impediment of free competition in different fields of society is forcing us to linger in material misery. In this way woman becomes a machine and loses her naturalness, existing only as a mere monkey of others. Life and a meaning of life appear in front of her as a book locked with seven seals.”

THIS is how Finnish writer, journalist and women’s rights advocate Minna Canth (1844–1897) described the social status of women in her article Of Women’s Issue in 1884.

CARTOON characters once restricted to the kid’s department now festoon adult apparel. Walk into any H&M or Sokos in Finland and you are bombarded with Snoopy, Tweety and Hello Kitty on anything from lingerie to lip gloss, all unmistakeably marketed to adults. Is this a vain attempt to reclaim childhood innocence or another marketing ploy embraced by a consumer society?

Merchandising turns any object into a commodity. Children’s merchandising has been strongly connected to children’s films and TV shows, while adult merchandising, previously based mostly on sports team items for fans, has also begun to exploit adult love for music, film and TV. Cartoons have long appealed to adults for their humour, so adults might also want to wear Spongebob or Shrek T-shirts.

DURING A WINTER like this one, when the whole country is blanketed with snow, the best maintained and illuminated tracks tend to get crowded. Turning your skis towards virgin snow, however, requires a completely new set of equipment, namely forest skis.

Compared to the ordinary cross-country skis, forest skis are much longer (240-280 cm) and wider (7 cm), which is why they float nicely, even in deep snow. One could always opt for snowshoes but they don’t glide like skis do. The tip of the forest ski is slightly narrow and soft as a birch branch. This means that the tip will always stay on the surface even in conditions of poor or powdery snow.

NOW that you’ve scoffed your cut-price Runeberg’s tortes and enjoyed the gluttonous cream-fest that is Shrovetide, don’t forget that on 28 February some poor, cake-bloated individual will drag themselves outside to hoist the flag yet again for Kalevala Day. On this day we celebrate the national epic, an oral tradition collected from the firesides of 19th century Finland and given the form of print by Elias Lönnrot. But what does Kalevala actually mean to the average Finn? SixDegrees asked a few people.

“It’s full of rape, murder and robbery. Like normal Finnish life. Väinämöinen somehow had something to do with the creation of the world. I think a sea-duck laying an egg came into it somehow too. He sang all the things into the world - the rivers, the lakes, the swamps and so on and so on(the list is very long and complicated).” -Jarno (37)

IF YOU THOUGHT Argentina’s gift to the world was Maradona, tango or perhaps beef, you thought wrong. I hereby introduce you to the alfajor.

Admittedly these delicacies are also found in other Latin American countries, but nowhere else do you find people as passionate about these wee confectionaries as in Argentina – and Argentines do like to claim these treats as their own invention.

Anyone who has taken a look at Microsoft Xbox 360’s downloadable Arcade titles can hardly have failed to notice one title in particular sitting pretty at the top of the downloaded charts. Developed by Finnish company RedLynx Limited, Trials HD is an insanely addictive game involving a motorbike and obstacle courses of ever-increasing difficulty. It is by all accounts one of the best-selling downloadable titles on the 360, having sold over 500,000 digital copies since its launch in mid-August last year.

The immense success of the game has bucked the economic trend. “It’s harder to justify a 50 or 60 euro price tag for a retail game in stores...