Spending your Christmas surrounded by snow, reindeer and huskies may seem like an unfulfillable festive fantasy for most of us, but with volunteer opportunities available on farms across the higher latitudes of the northern hemisphere, it could be possible to live out this winter dream for free. Organisations such as Workaway, Helpx and Wwoof list thousands of farms and projects around the world where volunteers can put in a few hours' hard graft each day in exchange for free food and accommodation. Since it's the season when we go mushy inside for all things festive, we've rounded up some real-life, pretty-as-a-Christmas-card opportunities to live for free in your very own winter wonderland.

Police have called off the search for two Dutch scientists. Unusually thin ice likely played a role in their presumed death in the Canadian Arctic this week

In a voicemail on Tuesday, Dutch researcher Marc Cornelissen, founder of Cold Facts, an organization supporting scientific research in polar regions, laughed at his predicament. He explained that unexpectedly warm weather had forced him and fellow explorer Philip de Roo to complete that afternoon’s skiing in the Canadian Arctic in their underwear.

“I’m glad you guys don’t have pictures of us on the ice,” he said with a chuckle. “But it was the only way to deal with the heat.”

Related: Inspirational climate researchers feared dead on Arctic expedition

Winter storms left the majestic architectural centrepiece of the SALT festival on the island of Sandhornøy, Norway, severely damaged. But after extensive rebuilding work, the experimental arts event returns, starting 18 June and running until 6 September, with a programme of live music and visual installations that it’s hoped will provoke a dialogue with the wild environment surrounding the site. New artworks have been commissioned, while Norwegian music producer Biosphere has created an original ambient soundtrack for the festival’s huge on-site “ampi-sauna”, which offers a view across the crystal clear horizon while you sweat out the previous night’s excesses.

TV presenter and comedian Alexander Armstrong discovers the secret of staying warm in Alaska

Nome, in the north-west of Alaska, is an old gold-rush metropolis peopled by workers from out of town. It’s rather splendid, and in the sweep of its town centre you get the feeling that it has hardly changed since the glory days. Huge civic buildings of yesteryear (nearly all of which have massive old gold pans outside their entrances like the trade symbols of medieval merchants) jockey with bustling engineering companies and colourful bars.

I’ve been making a circumnavigation of the Arctic Circle for a documentary. We’re reaching the end of our journey, and this is the first town the crew and I have been to that has more than two bars. It has a galvanising effect on us. We check into our hotel and head back out with unseemly haste. We discover the main activity in the bars of Nome is – weirdly – scratchcarding. People sit up at the bar in silence, industriously working their way through fistfuls of scratchcards and throwing them over their shoulders. At one place, the Polar Bar, the floor is knee-deep in discards.

I am in a fabulous state of suspension where the earth itself has taken control of me and my workings

Robin McKie finds life in the high Arctic a surprisingly chilled-out experience – even when a polar bear pays a visit…
Journey through the Northwest Passage – in pictures

It was the sight of a beached whale that provided us with a hint that we might soon get up close and personal with one of the planet’s greatest predators. Our party was drifting – in Zodiac power boats – over the icy waters of Coningham Bay, on Prince William Island in Canada’s high Arctic – when the beluga was spotted lying on the shore. A couple of others were seen minutes later. Stripped of their skin and blubber, the beluga carcasses were the leftovers of an Inuit hunting party and they were providing irresistible enticement for another set of locals: two large male polar bears.

The pair appeared over a sand dune and lumbered down to take a munch or two of whale before wandering off, clearly having already gorged themselves earlier. One bear – a huge hill of an animal with white and yellow fur, a battered nose and dainty cottonwool-like ears – swam to a nearby ice floe, where he sat staring at us. For the next quarter of an hour, he contemplated our tourist-filled boats – a feast in the making from his perspective. Our pilots kept their engines revved for a quick escape, though the bear was obviously in no mood for action, just a bit of eyeballing.

Wildlife is not the only attraction: the Arctic landscape alone is worth the trip – mysterious, bleak and haunting

Ryan Harris had been searching for the wreck of the lost ship of John Franklin for six years. Now, having finally located it, he tells Robin McKie what the find may reveal about the doomed expedition to discover the North West Passage

Ryan Harris has spent six summers working in the Canadian Arctic hunting the two most sought-after wrecks in marine history: the lost ships of British explorer Sir John Franklin. In those years, on remote islets to the west and south of the frozen wastes of King William Island, Harris and his team have found tantalising items including pieces of iron embossed with Royal Navy markings, which clearly came from 19th-century sailing ships.

Everything suggested these could be parts of Erebus or Terror, the ships in which Franklin sailed, in 1845, to find the fabled Northwest Passage between the North Atlantic and the Pacific before vanishing with all his crew. However, the precise location of the shipwrecks eluded Harris’s team, despite their trawling more than 1,600 sq km of seabed with sonar detectors between 2008 and 2013.

Illustrator, author and publisher Leanne Shapton grew up in Mississauga, Ontario, and attended McGill University and Pratt Institute. She has worked as art director on the New York Times op-ed page, and has contributed to Elle magazine and T: The New York Times Style Magazine. In 2003 she published her first book of drawings, Toronto. Her 2012 account of her early career as a trainee Olympic swimmer, Swimming Studies, won the 2012 National Book Critics Circle award for autobiography. Her book Women in Clothes, edited with Sheila Heti and Heidi Julavits, is out now, and her next book, Toys Talking, will be published by Particular Books in May.

After years of persecution, wolves are howling anew across Europe – and in the north of Norway an unusual zoo park is bringing them face-to-face with their nemesis: us

I arrive after dark, driving past piled up snow and pull up by a darkened log cabin office. No one comes out. I turn off the car lights and step into the freezing air. As my eyes adjust to the Arctic night, I see a green glow in the western sky, at first just two smudges on either side of the valley, a cosmic reptilian blush that grows into a phosphorescent super-highway that vaults across the snow-capped peaks. It is my 10th wintertime visit to the Arctic and, at last, I’ve seen the aurora.

At that moment a 4x4 comes up the road driven by my contact, Stig. “Follow me in your car,” he says softly. “At the top, when we get out, don’t make sudden movements or noises.”

Related: More than 11,000 Norwegians line up to shoot 16 wolves

Ryan Harris had been searching for the wreck of the lost ship of John Franklin for six years. Now, having finally located it, he tells Robin McKie what the find may reveal about the doomed expedition to discover the North West Passage

Ryan Harris has spent six summers working in the Canadian Arctic hunting the two most sought-after wrecks in marine history: the lost ships of British explorer Sir John Franklin. In those years, on remote islets to the west and south of the frozen wastes of King William Island, Harris and his team have found tantalising items including pieces of iron embossed with Royal Navy markings, which clearly came from 19th-century sailing ships.

Everything suggested these could be parts of Erebus or Terror, the ships in which Franklin sailed, in 1845, to find the fabled Northwest Passage between the North Atlantic and the Pacific before vanishing with all his crew. However, the precise location of the shipwrecks eluded Harris’s team, despite their trawling more than 1,600 sq km of seabed with sonar detectors between 2008 and 2013.

Frozen in for nine months a year and sandwiched between the largest national park and longest fjord system in the world, the setting of this tiny outpost is stunning

Ittoqqortoormiit (formerly known as Scoresbysund) is remote. So remote, in fact, that it bears the distinction of being the remotest inhabited community in the western hemisphere. This “edge of the world” settlement is home to just 450 hardy souls. To the north lies the Northeast Greenland national park, to the south Scoresby Sund, respectively the largest national park and fjord on Earth.

The town is made up of a scattering of wooden buildings, painted in an array of bright blues, reds, yellows and greens, across a coastal bluff of pink and grey gneiss (some of the planet’s oldest rock).

This week, they’re working in tandem but from November to April, the reindeer of northern Finland also compete for the title of Reindeer King

I’m in the far north of Finland. The sky is a perfect blue; beneath it, a few feet of ice lie between me and the black depths of Lake Inari. I’m part of a crowd, a thousand or so strong. We watch. We wait. Whoosh! Huff! Crunch! Half-a-dozen panting reindeer fly by, each pulling a jockey, crouched low over cross-country skis.

I’m here to make a Christmas radio documentary for the BBC World Service about reindeer racing, a big thing in the Arctic Circle. Every spring, communities get together in forest clearings to watch reindeer haul riders around 1km circuits. The gathering on Lake Inari is the final meet of the Finnish season; it’s here that the fastest 24 animals race to be crowned The Reindeer King.

With horses you can be a leader and tell them what to do, with reindeer you have to negotiate

The new open-all-year ice hotel is the base for exploring the dramatic, snowy beauty of the frozen north

The teenage me, buried deep beneath midriff fat and caution, screamed yes at the thought of a trip to the Swedish Arctic. The grown-up me – mother, wife, daughter, fulcrum of home life – started to risk assess. But my father had died in June and I thought a small adventure would do me good.

After two plane rides, I landed in Kiruna, home to the largest underground mine in the world – not that you see this, as the airport is tiny.

I found myself wandering round the camp at 2am, in -18C, wearing nothing but my pyjamas

At 11.30pm, the northern lights came out like the Wizard of Oz behind a heavy green curtain

A new activity resort brings guests right up against the wonders of the Arctic Circle, with floor-to-ceiling views over the fjords. Peter Carty is captivated by the flora, fauna and Norse mythology

It is the largest raptor I have ever seen. The sea eagle flapping imperiously across the tree line has a wingspan of well over two metres. Each mighty wing is tipped with feathers like huge spatulate fingers, while the white plumage at its rear resembles exhaust smoke – fitting for this B-52 of avians.

The Steigen archipelago in northern Norway is almost as remote as it gets in Europe, lying 62 miles inside the Arctic Circle. Among other dramatic features, it is home to the continent’s largest colony of sea eagles. My base here is the tiny island of Manshausen, where a resort and activity centre has been created by polar explorer Børge Ousland – the first person to reach the North Pole in a solo and unsupported expedition – as a place for exploring “the harmony between people and nature”.

A special kind of shock comes with the shooting of a polar bear. Their magnificence, their appearance of cuddliness, their ferocity, their vulnerability, their anthropomorphism – all combine to make the death of a single male, at the hands of guides for a tourist cruise ship, worldwide news.

The internet hummed with denunciation. It is hard to think of another creature, even one more endangered, whose loss would cause so much reaction.

It is contradictory to thrust these floating towns into places whose beauty is in their pristine solitude

There are no lifts in Norway’s picturesque Lyngen Alps, so if you want to ride down a mountain to the shore you have to hike up it first

I’m on top of the world, in all senses of the term: we’re 500 miles inside the Arctic Circle in Norway’s Lyngen Alps and I’m buzzing at having reached the summit of Riššavárri, after a 3^1/2-hour hike.

Jagged white peaks rise starkly from snaking, deep blue fjords, the sun is shining, the light’s amazing – and there’s no one here but me and my guide, Mikal Nerberg. With more than 60 summits over 1,000 metres, the Lyngen Alps have a quasi-mythical status among hardcore skiers. It’s a purely touring destination: there are no ski lifts, so any mountain you want to ride down you have to hike up, using “skins” on your skis for grip. With ski fans increasingly wanting a fitness break, rather than just boozy lunches and downhill meanders, touring is a growth area.

Related: Wild swims and mountain walks in Norway

Related: Fjord escort: a road trip to northern Norway

This multi-skilled explorer may well have been first to the North Pole – in 1909. What’s not in doubt is his resourcefulness and love of the Inuit

Passport details
Matthew Alexander Henson, perhaps the first person to the North Pole. Born Charles County, Maryland, US, 8 August 1866.

Claim to fame
Matthew Henson, the descendant of slaves, has a plausible claim to being the first explorer to reach the North Pole. He grew up in Washington DC and Baltimore, was orphaned and left school at 12 to be a cabin boy. When he was 22, a chance encounter with naval engineer Robert Peary resulted in a lifelong working relationship, including 18 years of Arctic exploration. On 6 April 1909, Henson, Peary and four Inuit drove their dogsleds to the North Pole – or as near as makes no difference. Peary took the credit for being first, but a newspaper article on their return quoted Henson as saying he’d been part of a leading group that had overshot the pole by several miles: “We went back then and I could see my footprints were the first at the spot.”

Missing the wild regions where I have worked, I took a linguistic trip from Asia to the Andes, via Russia and Finland, instead

A few years ago I spent a winter on Upernavik, a rocky island of 1,000 inhabitants off the north-west coast of Greenland. I’d been invited to Baffin Bay as part of a programme for international writers and artists to create new work about climate at one of the most northerly museums in the world.

The museum director emailed a warning in advance: the winter was better for introspection than exploration. Sure enough, I found I couldn’t leave the island, nor – with waist-high snowdrifts and continuous darkness – could I walk far around it. My daily excursions were limited to the path I dug from my cabin to the grocery store, or to the museum, where there was always coffee and a warm welcome.

This training in solitude and stillness turns out to be useful, as I stay home and explore the world by reading about it

In a new series about memorable encounters, the writer recalls the time she spent with a family whose way of life is threatened by the climate crisis

In mid-February, after months of darkness, the sun returns to the Upernavik archipelago in the far north-west of Greenland. After spending the long polar night working in the archives of Upernavik Museum, I’m eager to leave the islands and experience life elsewhere in the Arctic.

By March, I’m flying south in clear spring skies. As the propeller plane makes its descent to Ilulissat, I see snow-covered hills and the glistening tongue of the Icefjord, a Unesco world heritage site. In my phone is the number of a friend’s cousin, a hunter who needs help building a website for his fledgling tour company. In exchange, he’ll give me a place to stay.

Malik’s trust transforms me from a curious traveller to a witness

You may get lucky with the aurora, but Finnish Lapland also offers snowshoe hiking, glass-domed igloos – and even a Christmas wish with Santa

In Finland, fantasy can be more reliable than reality. That’s why, despite the fact that 160,000 tourists travel to Lapland every year hoping to see the elusive northern lights, the Finns have installed a dead cert: Father Christmas. Come cloud or snow, solar wind or solar silence, he’ll be on duty in Santa’s Village with a warm smile and a beard fluffier than a reindeer’s tail.

For me, Santa can wait. I touch down in Rovaniemi, 520 miles north of Helsinki, on a clear night, so there’s every chance of seeing the fabled aurora. The locals seem as used to overexcited adults as they are to children. In the Arctic Circle Wilderness Lodge at Vaattunki, my host, Marko Mustonen, levels with me in deadpan Finnish fashion: “Maybe you’ll see them. Maybe you won’t.”

See the sun’s first appearance in six months on an archipelago near the North Pole, plus free Landmark Trust visits and a new family-friendly hotel in Sardinia

Why go?
The end of winter is always a cause for celebration in Svalbard, and never more so than this year when the sun’s first reappearance above the horizon – after a long, dark absence of six months – will coincide with a total eclipse (20 March, svalbard2015.no). The archipelago, halfway between Norway and the North Pole, offers unspoiled Arctic wilderness, but doesn’t come cheap. Though airfares are lower since Norwegian Air started flying there (norwegian.com) the cost of living is high. But for many, a trip to this glacial outpost, where polar bears outnumber people, is worth saving up for.