Yule is a winter festival historically observed by the Germanic peoples that was incorporated into Christmas during the Christianisation of the Germanic peoples. In present times adherents of some new religious movements (such as Modern Germanic paganism) celebrate Yule independently of the Christian festival. Scholars have connected the original celebrations of Yule to the Wild Hunt, the god Odin, and the heathen Anglo-Saxon Mōdraniht ("Mothers' Night"). The term 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. Furthermore, 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.
The modern English noun Yule descends from Old English ġēol, earlier geoh(h)ol, geh(h)ol, and geóla, sometimes plural. The Old English ġēol or ġēohol and ġēola or ġēoli indicate the 12-day festival of "Yule" (later "Christmastide"), the latter indicating the month of "Yule", whereby ǣrra ġēola referred to the period before the Yule festival (December) and æftera ġēola referred to the period after Yule (January). Both words are cognate with Gothic 𐌾𐌹𐌿𐌻𐌴𐌹𐍃 (jiuleis); Old Norse, Icelandic, Faroese and Norwegian Nynorsk jól, jol, ýlir; Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian Bokmål jul, and are thought to be derived from Proto-Germanic *jehwlą-. 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 applied in an explicitly pre-Christian context primarily in Old Norse, where it is associated with Old Norse deities. Among many others, the god Odin bears the name Jólnir ('the Yule one'). In Ágrip, composed in the 12th century, jól is interpreted as coming from one of Odin's names, Jólnir, closely related to Old Norse jólnar, a poetic name for the gods. In Old Norse poetry, the word is found as a term for 'feast', e.g. hugins jól (→ 'a raven's feast'). It has been thought that Old French jolif (→ French joli), which was borrowed into English in the 14th century as 'jolly', is itself borrowed from Old Norse jól (with the Old French suffix -if; compare Old French aisif "easy", Modern French festif = fest "feast" + -if), according to the Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology and several other French dictionaries of etymology. But the Oxford English Dictionary sees this explanation for jolif as unlikely. The French word is first attested in the Anglo-Norman Estoire des Engleis, or "History of the English People", written by Geoffrey Gaimar between 1136 and 1140.
In modern Germanic language-speaking areas and some other Northern European countries, yule and its cognates denote the Christmas holiday season. In addition to yule and yuletide in English, examples include jul in Sweden, Denmark, and Norway, jól in Iceland and the Faroe Islands, joulu in Finland, Joelfest in Friesland, Joelfeest in the Netherlands and jõulud in Estonia.
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