Santa Claus and his elves

So for some reason, I got thinking about Santa Claus and one of the (I think intentionally meant to be a comedic premise) criticisms that gets sent his way is the concept that there are all these elves making toys and whoops, they are slaves or work under exploitative conditions somehow, and Santa is actually a capitalist or at least acts like one. But this has a slight problem, which is that Santa's whole thing is giving out free stuff with no strings attached: no expectations of reciprocation, no hidden fees, nothing. You don't even have to believe in him, you just have to be on the nice list or whatever (he doesn't want to give gifts to war criminals I suppose).

Anyway, this way he operates in the stories is much more in line with communism than anything capitalist. Like when the Black Panther Party made a program for feeding schoolchildren: https://www.history.com/articles/free-school-breakfast-black-panther-party

It wouldn't make any sense for Santa to have slaves / exploited workers because he's not getting any financial/capital gain out of doing this. His whole thing is making stuff to give it away, nothing more, nothing less.

We could maybe say that if Santa is a metaphor, it makes a bit more sense. He's a stand-in for free samples in an otherwise capitalist world and exists to lure you into buying more things and becoming more of a "consumer." But this is a bit of a stretch because in practice, Christmas tends to be people buying and giving each other gifts, not corporations giving out free samples.

So going back to the inner logic of it, I think Santa Claus makes the most sense as a communist and not only that, in order to meet the demands of creating presents for billions of people, a lot of automation is needed. In order to be able to get around the globe in time, faster than light travel is needed. This only makes sense if Santa and his elves are from a different planet, but are largely operating on a kind of prime directive style view of non-interference. We can figure, then, that Santa lives in the North Pole with his elves, who spend a bit of time operating some highly advanced automated tools and otherwise chill there most of the year, enjoying fully automated luxury gay space communism and occasionally popping in to remind people of the spirit of giving.

Disclaimer: This is a sillier post than a lot I write on here, please don't take it too seriously as analysis.