The image of the Madonna and child appears on nearly every religious Christmas card. It’s at the centre of every church nativity scene, and UK art galleries house hundreds of paintings of Mary cradling the baby Jesus.

But in most of these images, Mary looks European, with white skin and fair hair. Where does this leave Christians from African-Caribbean and other ethnic backgrounds?

In this festive edition of Things Unseen, Liz Adekunle goes in search of Mary as a Black woman and hears from Christians of different ethnicities how they relate to such images of Mary, also and especially at Christmas.

Liz hears about the turbulent history of one of England’s oldest Black Madonnas, at Willdesden in northwest London, destroyed during the Reformation and recreated for a new community in the 20^th century.

She finds out how the Polish Black Madonna of Czestochowa has inspired and comforted Polish people for hundreds of years.

And she visits a modern statue of the Black Madonna in Kilburn, also in northwest London, created to honour the many people in the congregation from African Caribbean backgrounds who worked on the front line during the Covid pandemic.