Zewditu Gebreyohanes ፡ ዘውዲቱ

@WillKnocker Thank you so much!!

Happy Giorgis Day Zewditu !

Here is an important article by @nigelbiggar on the issues about Project Spire - the £100m "reparations" (or "repair", using the Church's word) payment for slavery by the Church Commissioners. Gift link in thread...

@edwest Thank you Ed ☺️💫

@zewditweets Merry Christmas!

Happy Orthodox Tewahedo Christmas! መልካም፡ገና። ርሑስ፡በዓል፡ልደት።

@dampierguy Thanks Guy! 🙏✨

@zewditweets A Merry Orthodox Christmas to you!

@Nigel22335301 @TheCustodian25 @HilaryMcGrady Sadly yes.

@zewditweets @TheCustodian25 @HilaryMcGrady Says everything about what's happening in our country at the moment 🤔

National Trust Director-General @HilaryMcGrady is to be appointed a CBE. For context, more NT rooms, wings, floors and houses than ever before are closed off to the public with the shortage of funds given as an excuse, even as vanity projects on non-NT land abound; and Hilary herself (thanks to pay rise after pay rise) is on a salary of £227,765 with up to £20,000 in additional benefits while the median salary for National Trust employees is under £27,000 and staff are being made redundant because apparently there isn't enough money. Sad times.

How is it that someone who has overseen the destruction of one of our greatest national charities can be deemed meritorious of such a prestigious award?

A beloved holiday moment for New Yorkers and visitors alike: The Met’s Christmas tree and Neapolitan Baroque Nativity are now on view through January 6! ✨ Nestled in the Medieval Sculpture Hall, the installation features a beautifully illuminated twenty-foot blue spruce rising above an eighteenth-century Neapolitan manger scene. Silk-robed angels float overhead as dozens of beautifully detailed figures gather below, bringing the warmth and bustle of a Mediterranean harbor town to the heart of the Museum.

Merry Christmas! ✨

I would love to have a chat if you would be interested! I focus on these topics for my Substack The Custodian (see bio) and always find it valuable to hear first-hand accounts from people within the heritage sector.

@JChimirie66677 Superb! I worked in a museum for 7 years, & I observed a slow but obvious shift away from engagement with British & European histories. When they were represented, it was done in a way that focused more on critique than truth, ignoring their complex and unique qualities. So sad.

A publicly funded British museum has declared Father Christmas "too white," "too patriarchal," and morally unfit to judge children. This is not satire, parody, or a student stunt. It is the official voice of Brighton and Hove Museums – an institution paid by taxpayers to preserve heritage, now treating it as a problem to be solved. Their complaint is not that Santa has been commercialised or cheapened, but that he exercises judgement. The naughty list, we're told, is a "Western binary." Moral distinction is "colonial." The solution is to scrap judgement entirely, rebrand him as "Mother Christmas," and recast the elves as co-workers in a flattened, grievance-managed collective. Charity without standards. Joy without meaning. Tradition without roots. What's being proposed here isn't reform but repudiation. A cultural authority has looked at one of the most benign figures in European folklore – a symbol of generosity, restraint, and reward earned through conduct – and concluded that the problem lies not with human behaviour, but with the civilisation that dares to distinguish right from wrong. That alone tells you how far the rot has spread. The attack on Santa isn't about Santa. It's about narrative control. If they can make you feel ashamed of a story as joyful and harmless as Father Christmas – a figure rooted in European folklore, Christian charity, and festive tradition – they can make you ashamed of anything. Your history. Your religion. Your nation. Your skin. This is what ideological colonisation looks like: strip a culture of its symbols, flood its traditions with guilt, and turn its festivals into battlegrounds for theory. First Christmas was too religious. Then it was too white. Now it's too binary, too judgmental, too "colonial." What remains if this logic wins? Lights without meaning. Songs without story. A hollow shell where memory used to live. And let's not pretend this is an isolated case. Across Britain, cultural institutions are infected by the same poison – a bureaucratic class that sees its role not as steward of the past but as its interrogator. Museums sneer at what they were built to protect. Galleries use public money to dismantle beauty in the name of "reimagining." Libraries swap storytelling for ideology, and schools tiptoe around December as if tradition itself were a threat. Ask yourself this: would any other civilisation do this? Would Saudi Arabia replace Eid with a seminar on white privilege? Would India allow its temples to host deconstructions of Diwali? Would Nigeria denounce its tribal folklore as oppressive binaries? Of course not. Only the West does this. Only the West funds the demolition of its own inheritance and calls it progress. That's the deeper point. This isn't cultural evolution. It's self-harm dressed as virtue. These people don't want to "reimagine" Christmas. They want to dissolve it – to turn a season of belonging and wonder into a classroom for resentment. They see children not as heirs to joy, but as blank slates to be programmed with guilt. "Santa is too white" is just another way of saying you are too white. "Judgement is colonial" is code for morality itself being suspect. And if they get away with this, it won't stop at Christmas. Every tradition will be rewritten. Every figure flattened. Every national story edited until nothing remains but apologies and disclaimers. This is Year Zero thinking – erase what was, replace it with what should be, and raise a generation that no longer recognises the country it inhabits. Britain is being taught to forget itself – and to hate what it remembers. So no, this isn't just about Santa. It's about a line in the sand. Push back now, or surrender childhood, heritage, and joy to a class of cultural saboteurs who believe the past must burn so they can rule over the ashes. "They see children not as heirs to joy, but as blank slates to be programmed with guilt. "Santa is too white" is just another way of saying you are too white."

@Jilly03964397 Why is her dress see-through? 🤔

“And we started a new grift called Archewell Philanthropies so one day you can grow up to be just like Chelsea Clinton! Isn’t that great?”

Items should never be loaned to institutions that claim the artefacts are rightfully theirs, because it suggests that the borrower feels no moral obligation to return the items, rendering the risk of items not returning high. This is, of course, obvious: in no other context apart from so-called “contested heritage” would museum curators consider lending to a museum unless they were sure that the item would be looked after with care before then being returned.

As I explain, the British Museum has previously used "renewable long-term loans" as a loophole around legislation preventing the permanent repatriation of artefacts. Such extensions could in theory roll on indefinitely, turning a loan into a de facto permanent transfer while ownership stays on paper with the lender.

While the @britishmuseum's mass loan of ancient artefacts to an Indian museum may be more benign than the Telegraph suggested, I argue in this new piece that we should be wary of long-term loans that are surrounded with "decolonisation" rhetoric. thecustodian2025.substack.com/p/long-term-lo…

@mrcharlesamos *subsidising 😜

Put my head in hands today at council officials suggesting banning 18-21 year old birthday parties from the village hall while also subsiding pensioners to go to the pop up cinema there.

In fact I think the long-term aim is to have the artefacts abroad for long enough that by then the Heritage Act will have been amended (God forbid) and they are allowed to de-accession the artefacts.

My fear with all these long-term loans is that they will just get renewed once the initial three years are up. National museums are using self-renewing long term loans as a loophole around the Heritage Act, which prevents permanent return of artefacts. telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/12/1…

Is the National Trust Christianophobic? The Trust’s management refused to grant a Christian documentary maker permission to film at St Cuthbert’s Cave due to a fear of "religious affiliation", yet they have no qualms with Islamic affiliation. READ MORE: thecustodian2025.substack.com/p/is-the-natio…

The postponing of mayoral elections in areas where results will likely be unfavourable to @UKLabour betrays the gov's fear about being held accountable for their woeful governing of Britain. If we're getting rid of democracy, why not just return to rule by monarchy?