“We are tired and we are cold. May we please have shelter? … It is not by our own choice that we travel.”1 These words are placed onto the lips of Mary and Joseph in the Latino devotion, Las Posadas, a ritual enactment of the scriptural “memory” of the Holy Family’s difficult search for shelter in which Jesus could be born. In Las Posadas, figures of the Holy Family are “housed” at the homes of various parishioners through the Advent season, slowly making their way to church for Christmas Eve. The journey of the figures— mczkeshift by craftspersons, played by actors, or whatever—is a ritual enactment of the fraught journey that foreshadows Jesus’s birth, according to biblical tradition. The ritual elaborates the biblical portrait of their rejection: “Y’ou look dirty and you smell … for your kind there is no place, our inn is decent … For your reasons we care not, every room is taken … You are bad for business.”