It is Christmas. It is certainly an old word because it also exists in the South Danubian dialects (Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian: Crățun, Cărțun, Crăciun).
Its origin is highly debated. Many linguists have proposed various Latin terms, but phonetic and semantic difficulties make it difficult to demonstrate the origin. The most frequently invoked is Lat. creationem meaning child, as in Sard. kriatore, Sp. criazon.
Christmas must have meant at first the Child Jesus, which would explain the use of this word as a given name and surname.
Other linguists believe that the term creationem would have meant creation or birth. Precisely because in other Romance languages, the terms for Christmas (Fr. Noël, It. Natale) come from Lat. natalis - the day of birth.
The same word appears in several Slavic languages with which Romanian has been in contact (Bg. kracon, Sb. karcun - a personal name). In Russian, korociun appears in a chronicle from Novgorod (1143) and meant winter solstice.
