Yule (also called Jul, jól or joulu) is a festival historically observed by the Germanic peoples. Scholars have connected the original celebrations of Yule to the Wild Hunt, the god Odin, and the pagan Anglo-Saxon ("Mothers' Night"). Some present-day Christmas customs and traditions such as the Yule log, Yule goat, Yule boar, Yule singing, and others may have connections to older pagan Yule traditions. Yule and cognates are still used in English and the Scandinavian languages as well as in Finnish and Estonian to describe Christmas and other festivals occurring during the winter holiday season. Etymology The modern English noun Yule descends from Old English , earlier geoh(h)ol, geh(h)ol, and geóla, sometimes plural. The Old English or and or indicate the 12-day festival of "Yule" (later: "Christmastide"), the latter indicating the month of "Yule", whereby referred to the period before the Yule festival (December) and referred to the period after Yule (January). Both words are cognate with Gothic (); Old Norse, Icelandic, Faroese and Norwegian Nynorsk , , ; Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian Bokmål , and are thought to be derived from Proto-Germanic . Whether the term existed exterior to the Germanic languages remains uncertain, though numerous speculative attempts have been made to find Indo-European cognates outside the Germanic group, too. The compound noun Yuletide ('Yule-time') is first attested from around 1475. The word is conjectured in an explicitly pre-Christian context primarily in Old Norse, where it is associated with Old Norse deities. Among many others (see List of names of Odin), the long-bearded god Odin bears the name ('the Yule one'). In , composed in the 12th century, is interpreted as coming from one of Odin's names, , closely related to Old Norse , a poetic name for the gods. In Old Norse poetry, the word is found as a term for 'feast', e.g. (→ 'a raven's feast'). It has been thought that Old French (→ French ), which was borrowed into English in the 14th century as 'jolly', is itself borrowed from Old Norse (with the Old French suffix ; compare Old French "easy", Modern French = "feast" + ). But the Oxford English Dictionary sees this explanation for as unlikely. The French word is first attested in the Anglo-Norman , or "History of the English People", written by Geoffrey Gaimar between 1136 and 1140. Germanic paganism Yule is an indigenous winter festival celebrated by the Germanic peoples.