Holidays such as Christmas or Thanksgiving, with their endless plates of cookies, cakes, pickles, nuts, and chocolate, are occasions of rampant opsophagy, that is, the eating of dainties. The word derives from the Greek opson, meaning rich fare (especially fish), and phagein, meaning to eat. When the desire to eat such goodies becomes overwhelming, the rotund victim suffers from opsomania, literally meaning crazy for dainties. These words, like a host of other words based on the Greek phagein, appeared in English in the mid nineteenth century. Among the more interesting of these are mycophagy (the eating of mushrooms), hippophagy (the eating of horses), saprophagy (the earing of rotten food, common in college dormitories), onychophagy (the earing of fingernails), lotophagy (the eating of lotus fruit, supposed by the ancient Greeks to cause blissful forgetfulness), galactophagy (the drinking of milk or what the Greeks called gala, a word that also gave rise to galaxy, our own galaxy being the Milky Way), theophagy (the eating of God, as when Christians swallow the Eucharist), and poltophagy (the habit of chewing food until it is a liquid).