How do we get from a Christian holy day marking the birth of Christ to a celebration involving evergreen trees feasting and drinking and reindeer? Welcome to the endless knot. Today we look at the word, Yule. The Before it was co-opted to refer to Christmas, the Germanic word Yule meant the month-long holiday coinciding with the winter solstice, and specifically a pagan mid-winter fertility festival. The word Yule comes from the Old English Yeo, and is related to other Germanic words like the Old Norse Yule. We don't know for sure where this Germanic root comes from, but it might come from an Indo-European word Yac, which means to speak, and also gives us words such as joke, juggle, and jewel, probably through association with festivity, or it could come from an Indo-European word, which means to turn or move around, and also gives us words such as wheel and cycle, probably referring to the turn of the year that happens at Yule. From Old Norse Yule also possibly comes Jolly through Old French, Jolly, meaning pretty or cute, unless that comes from Latin, Gaudera, to rejoice, or maybe both sources are at play here. What is certain though is that Clement Clark Moore famously refers to Santa Claus as a Jolly Old Elf in the poem commonly known as, was the night before Christmas. The combination of the words Jolly and Elf, also from a Germanic root, starts us down the road to the Germanic origins of so many modern English and North American Christmas traditions. All because the early church decided to mash up Christ's birthday with mid-winter festivals. If you hear the word Yule today, it might be in the phrase Yule Log, a particularly large log traditionally saved for burning at Christmas, or a kind of log-shaped Christmas cake. It's been suggested that the traditional burning of the Yule Log has its roots in early Germanic pagan ritual. Trees seem to have been a big deal in early Germanic belief. For instance, when describing the Germanic people, the Roman historian Tassidus writes about the importance of particular types of wood and sacred groves as places of worship, and the Norse cosmology is based around the image of the world tree Iggresil. This emphasis on trees, also important to early Celts, seems to have survived in England from the time of the earliest Germanic peoples who settled there. We see this also in the tradition of Christmas decorations with evergreen such as Christmas trees, mistletoe, and holly, all symbolically appropriate for a mid-winter fertility festival since evergreen stayed green through the winter months. Christmas trees, too, seem to come from Germanic pagan roots, but aren't from that continuous English tradition. The Christmas tree was popularized much later in the Victorian period by Prince Albert, the German-born husband of Queen Victoria, after having been imported a little earlier by other German-born members of the British royal family. And then there's the traditional Christmas ham, a custom that goes back to the Germanic Yule Bor. The Bor was associated with the Norse fertility god Frere, and it was customary to sacrifice a Bor as part of the pagan Yule celebrations to ensure fertility in the coming year. This is reflected in the song The Bor is Head Carol. Slaughtering most of your livestock before winter, of course, makes good sense. Since then, you don't have to feed them all when food is scarce, and a new set of animals will be born in the spring. No wonder people often have a large feast at that time of year like our over-the-top Christmas dinners. So when you have to loosen your belt-to-notches over the holidays, you can blame those old Germanic pagans. Wasteling, now most familiar in the Christmas Carol, here we come a Wasteling, also seems to have roots in an Anglo-Saxon fertility tradition. Wastel, the drink, is similar to mold, ale, or apple cider, and Wasteling, which is now commonly used to mean the practice of Christmas Carol singing from door to door, also refers to the ritual of singing in apple orchards to scare away evil spirits and ensure a good apple harvest the next year. The toast itself, Wastel, is from the Anglo-Saxon, Wastel-Hau, meaning Be Thou Hale, or in other words, Be Healthy. But getting back to the word Uel, Nordic countries have a tradition of the Uel-goat, called a Uel-Bach in Scandinavian countries, or Uel-Pookie in Finland, which might involve constructing a large, strong goat or dressing up in a goat costume to go Wasteling or give out gifts. Though the modern version of Santa Claus has largely replaced the goat man, Fin still use the term Uel-Pookie to refer to the guy in the red suit. The Uel-goat may have its origins in the two goats that were said to pull the chariot of Thor, the north thunder god, and this may also have inspired the reindeer who pull Santa's slay. And remember, two of the reindeer are named Donner and Blitzen, which mean thunder and lightning. Incidentally, the term Uel-Bach, or Uel-Pookie, is etymologically the same as Uel-Bach, and Bach comes from an old Germanic word for a male deer or goat. Bach is a type of lightly-hopped, logger beer that is commonly associated with festive occasions, particularly Christmas. It's called Bach because originally it comes from a German town called Einbach, which when pronounced with a Bavarian accent, sounds like Einbach, meaning a goat. And so, beer labels on bottles of Bach often feature a picture of a goat, particularly appropriate given the Christmas association. But getting back to Santa's reindeer and Norse mythology, the chief god Odin wrote his eight-legged horse called Slapnir in the Scandinavian version of the Wild Hunt, a widespread European myth involving ghostly huntsmen on horseback riding wildly through the sky, and this is an element of the Germanic pagan Uel festival. Thus, Odin's eight-legged horse may have led to Santa's eight-rain deer, and Odin, who is sometimes known by the name Yolnihr, or Yulefiger, and often depicted as an old man with a white beard and hat and cloak, may have influenced our modern image of father Christmas or Santa Claus, in combination with the old English tradition of Old Father Time, as well as the Mediterranean gift-giving Saint Nicholas. Yeah, it's all a little complicated. Okay, back to Odin and the Wild Hunt. In Germanic pagan tradition, Yule is a time of supernatural occurrences and is connected with the cult of the dead and ancestor worship. Odin is, appropriately enough, a god of the dead, and this association with Yule may to some extent carry over to Christmas in the tradition of the Christmas Ghost Story. Think Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, with its ghosts of Marley and of Christmas past present and yet to come. Dickens is almost single-handedly responsible for the revival of Christmas as a major public holiday. Well, along with the popularizer of the Christmas tree, fellow Victorian Prince Albert. Remember him? Before the Victorian period, Christmas was in decline and not particularly popular. In fact, in what was the real war on Christmas, all over Cromwell and his party-pooper Puritan pals tried to stamp out Christmas, as did many of the early Puritan colonies in North America, passing laws forbidding its celebration and requiring shops to stay open, since they saw all that feasting and drinking and celebrating as rather too pagan. Well, as you can see, they weren't wrong. But then, where did Dickens' version of snowy festive Christmas's come from? Well, oddly enough, we have a volcano to thank for that. In 1815, Mount Tambora in Indonesia had an enormous volcanic eruption, which drastically affected world climate, making the following years remarkably cooler than usual, with the so-called Year Without a Summer in 1816 and at least eight snowy winters in a row in England. Not a common occurrence. As a result, winters for young Charles, who was born in 1812, involved the iconic white Christmases that set the tone for his Christmas writings, like a Christmas cow. Another literary outcome of the Mount Tambora eruption, by the way, was the cool and rainy summer in Switzerland in 1816, where Percy and Mary Shelley, Lord Byron and his personal physician, John Polodori, were holidaying. The miserable weather meant they stayed indoors a lot, and this led to them having a ghost story writing contest, which ultimately led to Mary's famous novel Frankenstein. And what could be more Christmasy than reanimated corpses, right? Well, oddly enough, maybe, according to Germanic mythology. In old North stories such as Greta's saga, it is said that the activity of Drowngar increases around you all, the Drowngar, with a walking dead, a bit like ghosts but more corporeal, so maybe more like zombies. They dwelt in their burial mounds and sometimes came out to make trouble for the living, attacking their homes and so forth, particularly at you all. In another old North saga, King Rolfsaga, one of King Rolf's warriors, named Balfar Bjarki, fights off some kind of winged monster which always attacks the King's hall at you all. This battle, along with a troll fight described in Greta's saga, are often held up as remarkably close parallels to the fight between Bay of Wolf and Grendel in the famous Anglo-Saxon poem. Though Grendel's attacks aren't specifically at you all as are the other monsters' attacks, Grendel does perhaps have a role to play in one of our modern Christmas stories. Dr. Sousa's How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Like the Old North Monsters, the Grinch comes to the settlement at Christmas slash you all. Like Grendel and the Old North Monsters, he comes at night. And the attacks of both the Grinch and Grendel are triggered by the sound of people singing and happily celebrating in their community, while the Grinch slash Grendel is left friendless out in the cold wilderness. Even their names, Grinch and Grendel sound similar, so perhaps Dr. Sousa was inspired by the figure of Grendel, as well as by Dickens' Christmas-hating character Scrooge in creating his iconic Grinch. So, as we approach the season of duel, don't be a Grinch, or Scrooge or a Grendel, and join me in raising a cup of wasail or a bottle of Bach to the fascinating origins of the coming holiday. I'll be back soon with more etymological explorations and cultural connections, so please subscribe to this channel. You can also sign up for email notifications of new videos in the description below. If you have comments or questions, I'm at Aliterative on Twitter, or leave them in the comment section. You can also read more of my thoughts at my blog at Aliterative.net. you