With “snow showers”, mince pies, festive beverages and nicknack stalls, it has all the ingredients of a traditional Christmas market.
But for the thousands of festive revellers converging at Dubai Media City Amphitheatre to attend the Dubai Christmas Festival this week, which ends tomorrow, there are some fairly obvious differences.
Guests in shorts and T-shirts take photographs on their phones around a giant Christmas tree without seeming to notice the incongruity of palm trees in the background, while others throw snowballs made of foam at each other and make mock snowmen while applying plenty of sunscreen in the 30°C heat.
Welcome to Christmas, Dubai style – a three-day paid-entry festive extravaganza complete with Santa’s Grotto, a pantomime, foam snow showers every hour on the hour, an ice rink, a snow park, funfair, school choirs and celebrities that is expected to draw about 22,000 residents hailing from all the four corners of the globe.
“We thought of the Christmas festival about two-and-a-half years ago,” says Chris Fountain, the managing director of the exhibition organiser Turret Media, which has put the event together.
“We had a sense that Dubai was missing a Christmas festival – not Christmas in the religious sense of the word but Christmas in the sense of celebrating all things festive for all demographics wherever they are from.”
Turret Media, also behind the Taste of Dubai restaurant festival, has invested thousands of dirhams in creating the Middle East’s first major German-style Christmas market. And now it is up to Mr Fountain, a middle-aged Brit and father of two, to make it happen for the second time.
Demand is strong. Turret reports last year, the first year it staged the event, it had expected to attract about 10,000 visitors. But in the end double that number, more than 20,000 people, paid to attend.
This year the company expects even more visitors to shell out for tickets that cost Dh30 for children and Dh60 for adults at the door.
“I guess one of the issues we faced last year was that we just weren’t prepared for the demand,” Mr Fountain says.
“We had everybody last year. When we first started looking at what sort of event it would be and who would come to it we got the sense fairly early on that this wouldn’t just be a western expat sort of a thing.
“It would appeal to everybody and it does. There’re lots of Filipinos, lots of Indians, of course western expats. There’s a good number of locals.”
But that sort of diversity brings its own challenges, especially perhaps in the Middle East, where the idea of celebrating a Christian festival in a Muslim country carries historical and cultural baggage.
“A Christmas market can work in a Muslim country simply because Dubai is a multi-faith, multi-cultural society,” Mr Fountain says.
“When we first launched it there was this question about whether it should in fact be called the Christmas festival. But because you can see Christmas references all around Dubai and Abu Dhabi during the festive period, we never saw any difficulty with calling it that.
“It’s more just a celebration of the time of year and everything it stands for rather than a religious event,” he says.
“We don’t have it as a religious-based event. There are no religious connotations about it.
“We’re not sitting there every day planning ways to make it non-religious in that sense but we are not promoting it as a religious event because it goes back to the whole point that all sorts of ways of living in Dubai are accepted,” Mr Fountain says.
As such, obvious religious symbolism is discouraged and school choirs are encouraged to sing Christmas songs rather than western carols.
“It’s about being as inclusive as possible,” says Mr Fountain.
“In the same way we’re very excited about our pantomime. But it can’t just work for the English because panto [pantomime, a traditional UK festive family play] is a very English Christmas tradition.
“If it was too much of a panto I’m sure some of our audience would find it a bit peculiar so we’ve got references without being a full-on Christmas panto.”
Mr Fountain is at pains to stress the event is not just an exercise in commercial exploitation.
“It’s not ripping the centre out of Christmas and making it just a shopping festival,” he says.
“It’s a place where family and friends come together. It’s a place for entertainment and music. And, of course, people don’t have to come but last year 20,000 people chose to.”
Certainly some festival visitors last year felt they received little for their entrance fee and complained that they then had to pay to take part in most of the attractions inside the show.
"I felt it was a bit of a rip off," says one disgruntled visitor, talking to The National on condition of anonymity.
“We had to pay to go into the festival and then if you wanted to get your kid on the bouncy castle or see Santa you had to pay again. We won’t be returning this year.”
Mr Fountain acknowledges “a few teething problems”, with last year’s show, which he puts down to it attracting double the numbers it expected. He says this year the organisers are better prepared and offer more free attractions for punters to enjoy.
And despite its sceptics, this year’s festival is promising to pull in a sizeable paying crowd.
So far Turret reports that the festival has already sold 2,500 seats for its version of a pantomime – Peter Pan and Tinkerbell and the Neverland Adventure – with tickets at Dh110 each.
The company has also signed up about 140 exhibitors and sponsors for this year’s show – an increase from about 100 the previous year. Turret says prices for participating in the show range from “a very low price point” for craft retailers selling nicknacks such as tablecloths to thousands of dollars for major sponsors.
In fact, says Turret, the numbers look so good it is considering setting up a similar event in the capital next year.
Nonetheless, the company has yet to make any money from the festival, although Mr Fountain says it is only a matter of time.
“It will be profitable,” he says. “We expect to break even in probably year three, possibly two or three in the event cycle. So far we see it as an investment. It’s part of our investment strategy.”
Much of the budget for the event is spent on marketing and advertising, attempting to keep the festival in the minds of Dubai’s transient and diverse community who are already receiving similar marketing material from dozens of hotels, restaurants and shopping malls.
“It’s not like when you put on a concert and people come for a couple of hours and they’re paying Dh300 for that,” Mr Fountain says.
“We’re trying to create something that’s more long term and fits into the Dubai calendar and becomes part and parcel of what people do every year.
“And to make that work you’re encouraging people to come and spend four or five hours a day with you, perhaps even longer,” he says.
“We can’t rely upon one thing in order to make it work. All of the component parts have to come together to create the experience.”
lbarnard@thenational.ae
