Insights From Social Media: Politicising Santa - When Even Myth Must Kneel

Colinxy writes > This essay follows my earlier piece, The Marxist Imperative: Politicise Everything, where I argued that the modern ideological project has no natural boundaries. It expands, metastasises, and colonises every available cultural space. Nothing is allowed to remain neutral, shared, or simply fun. Everything must be interrogated, problematised, and, ultimately, politicised.

Right on schedule, Brighton and Hove Museums have stepped forward to demonstrate the principle in action. In a blog post, the museum declared that Father Christmas is “too white,” “too patriarchal,” and in urgent need of “decolonisation”. His famous naughty‑and‑nice list, we are told, is a “Western binary” that reinforces “cultural superiority” and “colonial assumptions”[i]. Santa, apparently, is not merely a jolly gift-giver but an emissary of empire.

This is not satire. This is the earnest voice of a publicly funded cultural institution.

The New Ideological Tribunal

The museum’s critique is a perfect specimen of the contemporary ideological reflex. A harmless, universal cultural figure—one of the few remaining symbols that still unites children across cultures—is dragged before the tribunal and charged with crimes against the new moral order.

The accusations are familiar:

• Santa is too white.
• Santa is too judgmental—his naughty/nice list is a “Western binary” that marginalises Indigenous traditions.
• Santa is too authoritative, acting as “the ultimate authority of all societies”.
• Santa is too patriarchal, since he oversees elves and lacks a “Mother Christmas” to balance the gender ledger.

The proposed remedies are equally predictable: Santa must be diversified, stripped of hierarchy, placed in the toy factory to labour “alongside the elves,” and reimagined as a culturally fluid emissary of global equity.

This is not about Santa. It is about the ideological impulse to remake every cultural symbol in its own image.

The Colonisation of the Apolitical

The museum’s blog post is not an isolated oddity. It is a microcosm of a broader cultural pattern: the inability, or refusal, to leave anything un-politicised.

In my earlier article, I described the Marxist imperative to “politicise everything.” The logic is simple: if politics is everywhere, then the ideology must be everywhere too. Every tradition becomes a battleground. Every symbol becomes a site of struggle. Every story must be rewritten to serve the new narrative.

Santa is simply the latest casualty.

The museum’s argument even extends to the absurd claim that Santa cannot fairly judge “Indigenous children practising their own cultural traditions”. As though the world’s children are anxiously awaiting a moral audit from a fictional man in a red suit. As though the myth of Santa ever pretended to be a universal moral authority rather than a playful story told to excite children.

But this is what happens when ideology loses its sense of proportion. It begins to see colonialism in cookies and oppression in chimneys.

The Ritual of Deconstruction

The call to “decolonise Santa” is not a critique; it is a ritual. A performance. A demonstration of ideological piety.

The pattern is always the same:

1. Identify a culturally shared symbol.
2. Declare it problematic.
3. Diagnose it with the standard litany of sins—whiteness, patriarchy, hierarchy, colonialism.
4. Demand its transformation into something ideologically compliant.
5. Insist that this is progress.

This ritual is not about improving culture. It is about asserting authority over it.

When a museum, the custodian of cultural memory, announces that Santa must be re-engineered to satisfy ideological purity tests, it is not protecting culture. It is rewriting it.

The Loss of the Shared World

What is truly at stake here is not Santa’s whiteness or his work conditions in the North Pole. It is the erosion of the shared cultural space that makes social life possible.

Santa is one of the last remaining figures who belongs to everyone. He is not political. He is not ideological. He is not a symbol of Western supremacy. He is a story—a joyful, harmless, universal story.

To politicise him is to declare that nothing is sacred. Nothing is innocent. Nothing is allowed to stand outside the ideological frame.

And once nothing is apolitical, everything becomes a battlefield.

The Real Colonialism

Ironically, the attempt to “decolonise” Santa is itself a form of cultural colonisation. It imposes a rigid ideological framework onto a global tradition, demanding that all cultures reinterpret Santa through the lens of Western academic theory.

The museum claims to resist cultural superiority, yet insists that its own ideological worldview must govern how every child, everywhere, understands a mythical figure.

That is not decolonisation. That is ideological imperialism.

The Politicisation Pattern Across Cultural Symbols

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• The Santa case is not an anomaly — it is a textbook example of a broader cultural algorithm.
• The pattern is predictable because the ideology is expansionary: it must continually find new targets.
• The goal is not critique but control — the authority to rewrite cultural meaning.
• The cost is the erosion of shared, apolitical spaces that once provided social cohesion.

Conclusion: The Battle for the Un-political

The Brighton museum’s attack on Santa is not about Christmas. It is about the expanding reach of an ideology that cannot tolerate the existence of anything un-politicised.

Santa must be decolonised. Fairy tales must be interrogated. Songs must be audited. Traditions must be rewritten.

This is the world we now inhabit: a world where even myth must kneel.

And unless we push back, unless we defend the apolitical spaces that make life livable, the ideological project will continue its march, one symbol at a time.

[i] Father Christmas is ‘too white and patriarchal’, says woke museum | LBC

Source: https://nominister.wordpress.com/2025/12/28/politicising-santa-when-even-myth-must-kneel/