Ever got fed up with the usual schmaltz on your Christmas cards?

Ever thought about the fact that the Christmas story is also a refugee story?

Its tough to celebrate one refugee refugee story while ignoring thousands of others though, isn’t it.

As part of my Alternative Advent project for this year I’ve commissioned some ‘alternative’ Christmas card images, to remind us of the blood and guts in the original story and to raise some cash for refugee charities.

So if you send Christmas cards, get your hands on these limited edition prints of original artworks that I’ve made into very special Christmas cards, each of which reflects something of the real Christmas story.

Artwork is courtesy of Dean Rankine (Simpsons comics), Steve Beckett (The Beano), Stu McLellan (book illustrator) and Siku (The Manga Bible), and profits will be handed over to Safe Passage, a charity which works with refugee children.

There are about 80 million “displaced people” around the world today, and the United Nations say that more than half of all the world’s refugees are children. That’s a huge number however you choose to look at it, it works out around one percent of the entire world population.

Christmas is a refugee story, and Jesus was a refugee. His family fled when they knew that soldiers were on their way to kill him, it’s an experience that too many (any is too many, but in this case we’re talking millions) children and their families continue to have.