This time yesterday I was sitting in a cosy barn in the Chilterns, surrounded by a herd of goats and a surprisingly well-mannered donkey. A friend had kindly loaned me his farm to broadcast a live nativity to forty thousand primary school children across the country.

During the broadcast, we linked up with Kakuma Refugee camp in northern Kenya. Ajok, a 17-year-old from Sudan, explained what life was like for her there. She told us that her camp houses 200,000 refugees, and that each day she walks 5 kilometres to get to school, where she learns in a class of 130 students. When she gets home, she has to beg for food so her family can eat one meal a day. Despite all the hardship she is a young woman full of hope planning to graduate and become a teacher.

A friend at the UNHCR, who runs her refugee camp alongside the World Food Programme and the Kenyan Government, explained to me that, due to international aid cuts, supplies in the camp are severely limited. Ajok’s family have been categorised as “low need,” which means they now receive no food assistance.

Ajok’s Christmas will, sadly, be very different from mine. Yet it is her story that echoes most clearly the grittiness of the first Christmas. Her experience of being displaced is not dissimilar from Mary and Joseph’s - who were forced from their home at the worst possible time. Her anxiety over the lack of basic necessities reflects the Holy Family’s desperate search for accommodation in Bethlehem.

It is no wonder that Jesus identifies with the vulnerable and the outsider. Matthew’s gospel records him saying: “For I was hungry, and you gave me food. I was thirsty and you gave me drink. I was a stranger, and you welcomed me.”

Many of us miss this central message of hospitality to outsiders in the Christmas story. Some of us get distracted by the superficial, synthetic trappings of the festive season, others by the belief that immigrants are threatening our nation’s Christian culture. Both approaches fail to grasp the core of the Christmas story and its call to open our doors, our hearts, and our lives to those who need welcome most.

Mary and Joseph welcomed precisely those others would have turned away - humble shepherds and road-weary foreigners, sent to them by God himself. Little did Mary and Joseph know at the time that they too would suddenly find themselves fleeing across the border to Egypt - refugees reliant on the kindness of strangers.

This is why, in this time of Advent, it is people like Ajok —those struggling simply to get by who have much to teach us. The nearer we draw to the real Christmas story, the more we see just how the true Christ of Christmas is still breaking down walls, restoring dignity and inspiring generous hospitality.