Here is a rule, printed in the official guidelines of an actual world championship, which I would like you to read exactly as written:
Speed hugging: Most trees hugged in one minute. In a clearly marked area, hugging as many trees as possible in one minute, each hug lasting minimum five seconds.
That’s it. That’s a real sentence from a real rulebook. Somebody had to decide on five seconds. Somebody stands there with a stopwatch and a clicker. 🌲
First: whose forest is this
The championships happen in HaliPuu forest, near the village of Levi in Finnish Lapland. HaliPuu is Finnish for a hugging tree, and it is a family company — the same family that owns the trees.
The forest belongs to Pappa — grandpa — who inherited it from his father. When he was a small boy, his family had to flee the battles of the Second World War and relocate to that forest, in a remote Lappish hamlet called Veitservasa. In the family’s own telling, the forest “kept their growing family fed and clothed, it provided them shelter and income to slowly build a life for themselves.”
Pappa then spent his whole working life in the woods. Collecting pine cones for seed as a child. Lumberjack. His father’s saw mill, turning out “kilometres upon kilometres of plank” for local people to build their houses from. Firewood. Turf.
And then, at the end of all that, he decided he wanted to keep his trees standing.
That’s the origin story. Not a marketing idea — a man who cut timber for sixty years looking at a particular patch of forest and choosing, for once, not to. His daughter Riitta runs the place now with her husband Steffan, who is a nature guide and also, officially, the Campfire Barista. 🔥☕
The three disciplines
There are exactly three events, and every one of them is officially judged.
1. Speed hugging
A clearly marked area. Sixty seconds. Hug as many trees as you can, each one for at least five seconds.
Picture it properly. A person in a Lapland forest, sprinting between birches, arms out, counting under their breath — one, two, three, four, five — releasing, pivoting, going again. Judges counting. Somebody timing. The trees, being trees, doing nothing whatsoever about it. 🏃♀️🌳
In 2021 this was won by Anya of Switzerland, who got nearly eleven trees in the minute. Do the arithmetic: eleven hugs of five seconds each is fifty-five seconds of hugging, in a sixty-second round. She left almost no time for the running. That is, genuinely, an extremely good performance.
2. Dedication
The most dedicated hug of one tree of the contestant’s choosing, lasting maximum one minute.
The rules say what’s being scored, and I promise I am not embellishing: presence, intention, love, respect.
3. Freestyle
The most creative hug. Style open to contestant’s own interpretation, one tree only, lasting maximum one minute.
One person. One tree. Sixty seconds. Total creative freedom. Three judges watching. Go.
Reporting from the 2021 event described “almost theatrical freestyle techniques with props and all,” which is the correct amount of detail to leave you with. 🎭
And now the part that made me sit up
Read this line from the guidelines:
Event points are multiplied by a factor, so that the importance of speed hugging is less then that of the other two events.
They weighted the scoring against speed.
Think about what that means. They invented the funniest possible event — the one that gets written up in every newspaper, the one that put this post on your screen — and then they went into the rulebook and deliberately turned its value down, so that a person who hugs eleven trees very fast cannot beat a person who hugs one tree very well.
That is a group of people who know exactly what their joke is, and who are also completely serious about the thing underneath it. ✨
The judging is stricter than you’d think
The guidelines ask for three judges “with a connection to forests” — and they suggest professionals: scientists, people from national parks, journalists, artists. “Versatility is a plus.” Plus a couple more people to handle the timing and the counting in the speed round.
The whole thing runs about two to three hours.
There is also a house style, written down, for the mood of the event:
happy, friendly, fun & funny but not ridiculous
“Fun & funny but not ridiculous.” Somebody sat down and drew that line on purpose, for a tree hugging competition, and honestly it is a better editorial standard than most things have. 💛
The guidelines go on: based on science, creativity and community building. Inclusive, safe for people and for nature, sustainable, low carbon footprint, accessible. No politics, no violence, no racism, no sexism.
You can enter from wherever you are
This is my favourite structural detail. HaliPuu chooses who is invited to compete in person in the forest — the forest is small, and the organiser Riitta Raekallio-Wunderink has been blunt about why she won’t let it get huge:
“We are planning to grow it but it will not be massive, the forest can’t take it if there are too many people.”
But the Online TreeHugging World Championships are open to literally anyone on the planet. Find your favourite tree. Hug it. Photograph the hug. Post it with the hashtag and tag HaliPuu, and — this is the required part — include a description of why you love this specific tree.
Judges pick a winner on the depth of feeling in the hug and the creativity of the picture. And the prize is not a mug. The online champion gets flown to Lapland to compete live in the forest the following year, with a week’s stay for two and a private trip out among the trees.
It works, too. The 2023 online champion was Huyền Minh from Vietnam, whose photograph was of a damaged tree that had been pressed into service as a utility pole, wires running off it in every direction. She hugged it anyway. The organisers’ note on why she won: she “saw the unity instead.” The 2024 online champion, Nuria from Spain, duly turned up in Lapland the next August to compete in person, alongside huggers from Scotland, Ghana and Finland. 🌍
It’s spreading
The organisers didn’t try to keep it. They set up the World Tree Hugging Association — HaliPuu together with Virpi and James of GreenTrek and Anja of Finnomenal — and then published, for free, a guide called Organizing your own local event, which tells you exactly what you need:
an organizing team · a piece of forest/park/any space with trees · participants · a jury · social media accounts and contact with local press · necessary local permits
“Once you have these you’re pretty much set.”
So there is now a German national tree hugging championship, in Bad Pyrmont. The association says it wants to end up decentralised, with a board of enthusiasts from around the world. Which is a very funny ambition and also, transparently, a sincere one. 🇩🇪
Why they say they do it
HaliPuu’s own words, on their page for 2026:
We are taught that nature runs on competition — that the strongest survive and the rest fall away. But look at a forest more closely, and you see something different. Trees share resources, support each other, and communicate through networks beneath the soil. The most resilient systems in nature are not the most aggressive. They are the ones that cooperate.
We humans work the same way.
That’s the pitch, from the people running the event. It’s why they’ll happily hand you a silly world title: the silliness is the door, and what’s on the other side of the door is a person standing quietly in a forest for a minute, which is the entire point and is very hard to talk anyone into any other way.
A first-time German competitor named Anika said it better than the marketing does. She’d heard about tree hugging from her mother:
“I first thought it was a bit hoo-ha, but then I tried it and I felt really anchored and calmed down.”
And then, about the day itself:
“I like that here everybody wins — the trees win, the community wins, everyone participating is getting together.”
The 7th TreeHugging World Championships are on 22 August 2026, in a family’s forest at Levi, in Finnish Lapland. There will be a speed round. Somebody will hold on to one tree for a full sixty seconds while three judges watch and score them on love.
And if you can’t get to Lapland: there is a tree near you right now. It is not busy. It has no notes on your form. Five seconds is the official minimum. 🌲🤗
