Of course the main Finnish pastime is the Sauna bath. First you sit in a heated room, up to nearly 150 degrees, naked, beating your associates with birch twigs, to increase the circulation. Then you run out of the sauna to the adjoining lake, jump through the hole cut in the ice, into the water. Your blood pressure jumps up to 220/150, and if you haven’t had a coronary, you go through the whole process again.
When I was a prison counselor in Colorado I was invited by the Native American inmates into their sweat lodge ceremony which was one afternoon per week. After sweating with them once I found a group in Gardner, Colorado, in the mountains west of Walsenburg, that sweat on Sundays. I went there off and on during the spring and summer of 2003, the last year before I moved back to Tennessee. They do a four-day Sun Dance ceremony there every year and a Vision Quest.
Since men enter the ceremony without a shirt you can see the scars on their chests from where the hooks have been set in the Sun Dances they have done.
The sweat lodge ceremony, which is Lakota and other Plains tribes, is divided into “doors.” A “door” starts when hot lava rocks are brought from a fire with iron tongs into the sweat lodge and dropped into a pit in the middle of the lodge. Then the flap—or “door” is closed—and the elder begins poring water over the stones. It gets close to 200 degrees in there for a short time. People chant and a drum is beaten. People take turns praying out loud. It is pitch black and you sit, packed in there like sardines. The door lasts about 15 minutes or so until the rocks cool. Then the flap is lifted and you can step outside for a few minutes until the next door starts.
Anyway, I never sweat during the winter but they told me that at the end of a door during the winter they roll around in the snow.