On Christmas Eve 2015, 15-year-old Zainee Hailey attended a service at her Elizabeth church, where she sang in the choir. Her family returned home to Newark and exchanged their gifts, which was customary. There was so much discarded wrapping paper, her mother asked Zainee to take it downstairs and put it in the garbage. Across the street, a teenager with a gun was aiming at another teenage boy who he thought had disrespected his girlfriend. Instead, he killed Zainee on her own porch.

I did not know Zainee or her family but was so outraged that she lost her life over gun violence on her own porch at Christmas that I attended her funeral at that same Elizabeth church where she had been for Christmas Eve. I walked by her white coffin in front of a packed church and then sat in the choir loft for the funeral.

The next Christmas I preached this story and told the people that Christmas should be an antidote to urban violence, especially among minority youth, and we must resolve to make the birth of Jesus really matter. And to promise to work for gun control and peace in our cities.

After the Mass, a father asked to speak with me, outraged that I had preached Zainee's story on Christmas Day, "of all days, with children present."

For him, I sensed that reality -- meaning violence -- has nothing to do with Christmas and I had disturbed him and his family.

I wanted to respond angrily but simply said, "I wonder what Zainee's family was doing this Christmas."

He walked away annoyed.

And maybe that was the right response. We have sanitized and commercialized the meaning of Christmas and robbed it of its deeper meaning: Jesus enters our world as a homeless exile, not only to identify with all of humanity but especially to expose the injustice toward people who are disenfranchised.

The universal description of Jesus' birth in a manger in Bethlehem might indicate that his family had no home at first, since the census was conducted to assess one's home and farm for tax purposes. "And while they were there, the time came for her to give birth. And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn."

Later, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, "Rise, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you, for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him."

Now Jesus is an exile and has to experience what so many people have gone through over time: forced migration. The Roman Empire ruled ruthlessly, as did subsequent emperors and kings.

Christmas recalls what Christians believe happened over 2,000 years ago. But the Christ among us today motivates us to bring about the Kingdom of God, which he ushered in when he embraced our humanity. His itinerant ministry becomes our model of healing humanity and our world. We have reduced Christmas to a sort of fairy tale, devoid of reality. But even fairy tales reveal a deeper meaning. For Christmas it's not to blot out the world, but to redeem it.

And there will be so much to do. More people around the globe have migrated simply to survive. As Syria, for example, has finally thrown off the yoke of dictatorship, millions of displaced Syrians are flocking back home to a country virtually destroyed physically and spiritually. Their persistence was stronger than a dictator, who even gassed women and children and killed over 600,000 of his own people.

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Back home, we face the prospect of rounding up immigrants, placing them in deportation camps and sending them back to countries where their lives were in danger. All to satisfy the white nationalists feeling threatened by a more global U.S. -- 15.6% born elsewhere in 2024 -- and led by a president and a bizarre Cabinet of billionaires who see government as their playground. Even as some 1,300 children are still separated from their parents from the first Trump administration, he is promising to rip more families apart.

That is just one of many threats coming from a hollow Christian president who markets his own Bible he knows nothing about. And that's why Christmas for him is simply a quaint story. Also, for millions more. It can't be.

Yes, on Christmas we sing about peace and joy even though we know that it is often elusive. Living like Jesus today means a commitment to make our world a better one, not because Jesus lived a fairy-tale life but so his life would matter. And so must ours. The Christmas creche is filled with angels, shepherds and animals idyllically. Follow the Jesus whose homelessness and exile make him closer to our experiences -- really.

The Very Rev. Alexander M. Santora is the pastor of the Church of Our Lady of Grace & St. Joseph, Hoboken, and dean of the area Catholic churches.