You've heard of the Spirit of Christmas past? It still influences Christmas present

For the latest Yuletide trend within a trend, consider the plight — if it can be called that — of those who have resolved to pause their Ozempic treatments for Christmas.

Ozempic, created for a purpose no one can remember anymore, had the more desirable side effect of precipitating weight loss, and has become the designer drug of choice among women of a certain class who, frankly, don’t look that bad to begin with, but decide they would look even better minus 25 pounds or so.

Ozempic is an appetite suppressant, which is in itself a problem when the holidays present us with so many tasty temptations. Who wants to feel satisfied after just a normal portion of Beef Wellington?

Going cold turkey, so to speak, is also a money saver. The drug costs nearly $1,000 a month, so a little holiday gluttony comes with significant cost savings. The Ozempic phenomenon also affords us the yuletide joy of listening to socialites wishing for a more comprehensive American health care system so they can fit into their skinny jeans.

The risks of this social double negative — the side effects for stopping a drug that you are taking for its side effects — are, as you might suppose, weight gain. But no matter, you can go back on the medication to reverse the reversal.

So to each his or her own. This is the joy of Christmas, which has become a great melting pot of holidays, open to anyone who cares to play, from Christian to pagan and everyone in between. Those who believe that Christmas has lost its meaning are right; it’s been lost many times over the centuries, yet it always finds its way, spreading joy the world around.

Neolithic celebrants would have had no use for Ozempic at winter solstice or any other time of year, at an age where every calorie was precious. These great festivals were BYOB, or Bring Your Own Beast, the cattle and hogs being driven hundreds of miles to supply massive feasts and offer prayers that were always answered — that the days would begin to lengthen and that the winter darkness would not get any worse. Had mankind stopped its theological wish list at that, what a happier place we might be today.

“Christmas” didn’t come into the vernacular until 1038, most early clergy believing that the celebration of a birthday was a heretic’s errand. The true day to celebrate, they believed, was the date of a saint’s martyrdom, but somehow, death never caught on as a reason for a party.

So the church was not the primary focus as, from the Romans thorough medieval times, these winter hootenannies featured eating, drinking, bawdy games and other amusements, such as servants and masters switching roles for a day.

The birthday assigned to Jesus, in the year 221, was less a product of historical accuracy than it was bandwagon jumping — this winter solstice thing seemed to be a good time, so if you can’t beat them, join them.

Religious services didn't start creeping into winter ceremonies until the 9th century, and even then, what would become Christmas was less important than Good Friday or Easter. Nor are many of today’s typical Christmas traditions inspired by Christian beliefs.

It was a Renaissance humanist, Sebastian Brant, who in 1494 denoted the decoration of homes with evergreens, a custom that grew by 1600 into the first Christmas tree, decorated primarily with candles and apples.

But a Christmas tree is pretty lonely without gifts, and by the 17th century this tradition was fully entrenched — a form of secularism that was the last straw for the Puritans of Old and New England, who banned the celebration of Christmas from their communities altogether.

This of course, if the idea was to win hearts and minds of the public at large, was never going to fly. So in the 1823 poem “The Night Before Christmas,” we were introduced to St. Nick, a benevolent fellow based on a 4th century Greco-Christian bishop who lavished gifts on the poor.

St. Nick was a compromise. Victorians, not liking the direction Christmas was heading, with its wassailing (an early holiday version of a pub crawl) and other decadent behaviors, were willing to accept a jolly old redistribution of wealth in clerical garb who was fun, yet doctrinally nonthreatening.

In St. Nick, or Santa, latent paganism could inject the more worldly, party-oriented elements of Father Christmas, while more sober elements fell back on the more putative Dutch Sinterklaas, who carried a stick with which to smack the naughty.

So it is without apology that we wish you a Merry Christmas. Because no matter what your beliefs, there is bound to be something in it for you.

Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Christmas is the great 'melting pot' of holidays