Unless you are destitute, you will have animals to tend to each day, giving them daily new food and water. If you have farmhands, they'll tend to that for you. In large parts of Sweden, Norway and Finland, the hay grown around the village was not enough to feed all animals, and therefore, hay would be gathered at bogs in the village forest. The bog hay was stored in barns on these bogs, which could be remotely located. Parts of the winter time would be spent fetching this bog hay and bringing it back to the farms.

This period of the year was the calmest, and people of different provinces chose different means of passing the time. In large, this was the time to repair things that had been broken, weave (the old-fashioned warp-weighted looms went out of fashion in this century in favour of the standing loom), hunt birds and game (where it was possible).

There were several markets taking place in the late winter that one could visit, such as the Kviteseid Market or the market of Jokkmokk, both taking place in febrary. People would come from miles (and still do, out of tradition) to sell butter, hides, horses, and other commodities.

Felling and transport of timber, as firewood, building materials or for foresting purposes (the occasional sawmill industries were beginning to establish under the late 18th century), was primarily done under the winter, when the humidity is low in the trees and the snow provides the means of transportation on sledges.

But this question, "what do people do with their spare time?", was also asked once by a Norwegian man named Eilert Sundt. This was during the 19th century in which the industrial revolution had begun to change traditional society, but much of what he saw was essentially what one would have seen if one had visited a hundred years earlier. He travelled Norway to document all forms of handicraft and published them 1868 in a book called "Husfliden i Norge: til Arbeidets Ære og Arbeidsomhetens Pris" (Handicraft in Norway: to the Glory of Labour and the Cost of Diligence).

In most places he came to, he found people preoccupied with such things as I have mentioned above, as well as handicrafts pertaining to their line of works. Smiths would smith, wheel-makers would make wheels, shoe makers shoes and so on.

The big exception to this diligence was a valley called Setesdal in southern Norway, which his description thereof is near legendary. Translating and quoting from it:

"What do they do in winter?" I naturally had to ask.

"Nothing."

"Well surely something you must have to do?"

"Literally nothing."

"Well, what does someone do that does nothing? What is to do nothing? What in heaven's sake does a man do to pass the time that has nothing to pass the time with and that during a whole winter?"

"He sleeps, he smokes pipe by the fire, he visits his neighbours and sits there for a while".