Saturnalia
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Saturnalia (from the god Saturn) was the name the Romans gave to their holiday marking the Winter Solstice. Over the years, it expanded to a whole week, the 17th through 23rd of December. It also degenerated from mostly tomfoolery, marked chiefly by having masters and slaves switch places, to sometimes debauchery, so that among Christians the (lower case) word "saturnalia" came to mean "orgy."
It was traditional for Romans to exchange gifts during this holiday. These gifts were customarily made of silver, although nearly anything could be given as a gift for the occasion. Several epigrams by the poet Martial survive, seemingly crafted as riddling gift-tags for gifts of food.
The customary greeting for the occasion is "Io, Saturnalia!" -- io (pronounced "yo") being a Latin interjection related to "ho" (as in "Ho, there").
It has been postulated that Christians in the fourth century assigned December 25th as Christ's birthday (and thus Christmas) because pagans already observed this day as a holiday. This would sidestep the problem of eliminating an already popular holiday while Christianizing the population. It created other problems because of the coexistence of the two feasts: see Bishop Asterius of Amasea's New Year's sermon in 400 CE, discussed at the entry Lord of Misrule. The medieval celebration of the Feast of Fools was another continuation of Saturnalia into the Christian era.
Saturnalia is also a very early sauropodomorph dinosaur genus, from the Carnian faunal stage of the late [[Triassic](227.4 - 220.7 Mya), which was discovered in southern Brazil; it was found in mid-winter, at the Saturnalia, and named in 1999. It is one of the oldest true dinosaurs yet found.
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