Ooh, Renaissance Faires and the likes are fun. We used to have a great annual "Scottish Event" as they called it but it was cancelled this year due to the leasehold of the estate (a monumental building/estate owned by Natuurmonumenten, a Dutch Government Organization for Protected Area) on which the event is hosted not being extended, as well as renovations to the estate.
Said event may or may not return when the renovations are done and there are new leasers of the estate, but it's all really unclear at the moment.
We haven't had many winters worth preparing for the last several years, and even when it's a 'harsher' (by Dutch standards) winter there's not much preparing necessary, other than making sure you have a shovel to clean the driveway if it snows and making sure you have some road salt. (Especially because our municipality has managed to run out of the stuff early in two of the last three winters where we actually had a decent amount of staying snow, though they managed to replenish their stock half a week later or so. Decent amount of snow still being a low amount compared to the more northern countries. It's been a long time since I've seen more than maybe a foot of snow equally spread, and the only time I've seen several feet of snow is when the wind blows it on heaps against some object. I've seen school cancelled due to snow exactly once in my school-time and that was called in so late about 85% of the students ended up at school anyway just to be told "no school" and head back home through the snow...yeah, real useful that. Driving licenses are at 18 here, though, so it's not like anyone had to drive a car. Just walk, bicycle, take public transport or in cases of those 16 and above, drive a scooter. Not that more than a handful of folks even decided to come by scooter what with the snow, from what I remember)
And have some food/blankets/candles or battery-powered torches in case the power/gas/water drops out, but that's just good sense to have in a home under any circumstance. Not that it happens often; if I've had the electricity quit on me for four hours total in the past decade it'll be much; I've been without water last summer when a pipe sprung next town over but that was fixed within two hours and I can't even remember the last time anything happened to the gas. Phone landline and internet have been out a fair few times last summer when they managed to keep. hitting. cables. during construction work but cellphone kept signal so there's that.
It's possible we get a genuinely harsh winter, of course--it happens, just not often--but even so this is the Netherlands. We have basically no wilderness worth speaking of, at least not in the meaning of "being a long way from civilization". Small country with a high population density and all that. We have a land surface area of ~33,900 km2 with around 7000 towns/villages/cities. That's one town, village or city every 4.8 km2 on average(!). There's like...three hospitals with a first aid and emergency post in a ten km radius of me, too, and the roads to them are kept free of snow quite well (provided snow actually falls, anyway--two of the past five winters I've seen less than an inch of snow and it didn't stay more than half a day), other than the ~200m before I actually leave the neighbourhood.
So basically, by the time I'd actually need more than basic preparations, there's a lot more wrong than just winter.
I'll repeat DfDevadander's question: how do you all prepare for winter?
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