It is the ancestors, perhaps, who are really had in mind when libations are made upon the Yule-log, an observance known to Martin of Braga in the sixth century[945], and still in use in France[946]. Nor can it be doubted that the healths drunk to them, and to the first of them, Odin, lived on in the St. John’s _minnes_, no less than in the St. Martin’s _minnes_, of Germany[947]. Apart from eating and drinking, numerous folk-beliefs testify to the presence of the spirits of the dead on earth in the Twelve nights of Christmas. During these days, or some one of them, Frau Holle and Frau Perchte are abroad[948]. So is the ‘wild hunt[949].’ Dreams then dreamt come true[950], and children then born see ghosts[951]. The werwolf, possessed by a human spirit, is to be dreaded[952]. The devil and his company dance in the Isle of Man[953]: in Brittany the _korrigans_ are unloosed, and the dolmens and menhirs disclose their hidden treasures[954]. Marcellus in _Hamlet_ declares: ‘Some say that ever ’gainst that season comes Wherein our Saviour’s birth is celebrated, The bird of dawning singeth all night long; And then, they say, no spirit dare stir abroad; The nights are wholesome; then no planets strike, No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm, So hallow’d and so gracious is the time[955].’ The folk-lorist can only reply, ‘So have I heard, and do not in the least believe it.’ The wanderings of Odin in the winter nights must be at the bottom of the nursery myth that the Christian representatives of this divinity, Saints Martin and Nicholas (the Santa Claus of modern legend), are the nocturnal givers of _strenae_ to children. In Italy, the fairy Befana (Epiphania), an equivalent of Diana, has a similar function[956]. It was but a step to the actual representation of such personages for the greater delight of the children. In Anspach the skin-clad _Pelzmarten_, in Holland St. Martin in bishop’s robes, make their rounds on St. Martin’s day with nuts, apples, and such-like[957]. St. Nicholas does the same on St. Nicholas’ day in Holland and Alsace-Lorraine, at Christmas in Germany[958]. The beneficent saints were incorporated into the Kalends processions already described, which in the sixteenth-century Germany included two distinct groups, a dark one of devils and beast-masks, terrible to children, and a white or kindly one, in which sometimes appeared the _Jesus-Kind_ himself[959]. It is perhaps a relic of the same merging which gives the German and Flemish St. Nicholas a black Moor as companion in his nightly peregrinations[960].