What Dubai gets right (and wrong) at Christmas

Christmas in Dubai is an acquired taste. For newcomers, it can feel like a series of contradictions: carols in 25-degree sunshine and red bobble hats by the swimming pool; kids in damp swimming gear gathered round the Filipino Santa’s gift sack.

For those of us who have been here a while, however, it has become a familiar ritual and one that the city does remarkably well. Mostly.

Start with the obvious advantage: the weather. While friends and family in Europe wrestle with storms, flight delays and the debate over how many layers to wear, Dubai offers clear skies, warm days and evenings cool enough for an outdoor dinner.

Christmas lunch on a terrace overlooking the sea, or even on the sand itself, remains one of the great pleasures of life in the Gulf.

Hotels, in particular, have perfected the festive formula. Dubai does Christmas as a hospitality exercise with industrial precision. I spent the day at the Jumeirah Beach Hotel, one of the city’s real treasures, and which, coming up to three decades of hospitality, has perfected the art of Christmas.

Our mixed-nationality party of about 15 enjoyed the traditional European menu – turkey, stuffing, pigs in blankets, mince pies – but were also able to sample cuisine from the four corners.

Levantine mezze sat happily alongside Yorkshire pudding, Asian seafood stations competed with French pâtisserie, and baklava was the alternative to Christmas pudding. It is festive without being parochial, which suits the city’s orientation. Christmas lunch in Dubai is a globalised affair.

What also works is the ease with which the city celebrates a holiday that is not officially its own. There is no awkwardness about celebrating Christmas in a Muslim country. On the contrary, Dubai treats it as another opportunity to showcase tolerance, cosmopolitanism and, of course, some serious shopping.

Supermarkets stock mince pies and Brussels sprouts with the same efficiency they apply to Ramadan dates and labneh. Restaurants offer mulled wine  with cheerful professionalism, regardless of the religious background of the staff serving it.

Service is impeccable, as ever. The machinery of Dubai’s hospitality sector hums along relentlessly through Christmas Day itself, because December 25 is not a public holiday here. Restaurants are full, the malls are packed, and taxis much in demand.

Then there is the sheer enthusiasm with which Dubai embraces the visual language of Christmas. Decorations go up early and come down late, while the malls transform into winter wonderlands. The hotels compete to build the tallest tree, the largest gingerbread house, or the most elaborate reindeer display. 

But it is precisely here that Dubai sometimes gets Christmas slightly wrong.

The decorations are impressive, but often curiously soulless. They are grand, expensive and technically flawless, yet also strangely bland and uniform. The same baubles, the same trees, the same orchestral versions of carols looped endlessly through malls.

Some of these seem to have been rewritten by a very woke algorithm. In one version I heard of the old standard “Winter Wonderland”, the snowman named “Parson Brown” was transformed into “a nice old guy”, no doubt to avoid the remote possibility of offending religious sensibilities.

There is also the small matter of traffic. Christmas Day may be a holiday elsewhere, but in Dubai it is business as usual for many, as roads around malls and beach hotels clog up and the leisurely festive lunch can begin with an hour spent staring at brake lights. (I’m talking about you, Sheikh Zayed Road.)

Perhaps the greatest absence, however, is silence. In Europe, Christmas morning carries a particular stillness: closed shops, empty streets, a collective pause. Dubai never quite stops.

That energy is usually one of its defining strengths, but at Christmas it can feel slightly at odds with the spirit of enforced idleness that many associate with the season. I do miss those hours of post-prandial dozing on a sofa with half an eye on “The Great Escape” – though paddling barefoot in the sea at sunset also has appeal. 

It is easy to love Christmas in Dubai. The city excels at hospitality, inclusion and convenience. For the thousands of expatriates who cannot or choose not to travel, Dubai offers a Christmas that is as easy and pre-prepared as the turkey lunches available for home delivery from virtually every hotel.

This year, as ever, Dubai got Christmas mostly right. The sun shone, the tables were full, the menus generous. My crowd left the JBH full of festive spirit and bonhomie.

Dubai does not try to recreate Christmas as it is in Europe or north America. It re-engineers it for a city that never really pauses, even for goodwill and cheer. For those of us who have chosen to make our lives here, this slightly odd, sun-drenched version of Christmas has become its own tradition.