Christmas roast takeaway in Dubai: Christmas on the 27th

Early November

The roster, and a decision

The December roster went up on the noticeboard outside the unit on a Tuesday, and Priya found her name before she found her glasses. Three long days: the twenty-fourth, the twenty-fifth and the twenty-sixth. Seven in the morning to half past seven at night. She had worked the last two Christmases too, but last year the twins had been six and easily distracted. At seven, Arjun and Meera kept a calendar.

She told them that evening, at the kitchen table, with the honesty that ICU nurses tend to bring home with them. She would be at work on Christmas Day. Christmas was not cancelled. It was moving to the twenty-seventh, which was a Sunday, and it would be exactly the same Christmas, only two days later and with Mummy in it.

Meera asked whether Santa knew. Arjun asked whether waiting meant more presents. Priya said yes to the first and a careful no to the second, and wrote 27 on the calendar in red.

Mid-November

Ordering a Christmas roast takeaway in Dubai

Priya does not roast turkeys. Her mother, arriving from Kochi in the second week of December, does not roast turkeys either, and said so with some conviction. So the roast would come from someone who did.

She started looking in mid-November, when hotels and restaurants around the city publish their festive takeaway menus. The slots for the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth were filling quickly. The twenty-seventh was wide open, which was the first small gift of moving Christmas. She chose a roast turkey for four to six, with roast potatoes, vegetables, pigs in blankets, stuffing and gravy, delivered at four in the afternoon.

Before she paid, she asked three questions, and was glad of each. Does it arrive hot, or chilled with instructions for reheating? Chilled, with a sheet of times. Will a whole turkey fit an apartment oven? It would arrive carved. And is the gravy included, or extra? Included, in a tub, which turned out to matter a great deal to Arjun.

23 December, late

Packing the Christmas Eve box

The one thing she would not move was Christmas Eve. So she built it in advance, in a shoebox wrapped in brown paper, one box for both twins because they would only argue over whose was bigger.

Inside went two pairs of new red tartan pyjamas, a book each (a dinosaur encyclopaedia and a story about a fox), two mugs and a jar of hot chocolate, a film they had not seen, a small torch for reading under the covers, and a letter in her own handwriting that started I am at the hospital looking after someone’s grandad. She added a note for her mother with the bedtime, the number of marshmallows allowed and the words please do not let them open anything else.

At one in the morning she wrapped it, put it on top of the fridge and set three alarms.

24 December, 6pm

A Christmas Eve on a phone screen

At six, in the staff room, Priya propped her phone against a box of gloves and watched her mother take the parcel down from the fridge. The twins opened it in the order she had numbered the items, which they ignored, and put on the pyjamas over their clothes, which she had not anticipated.

The call lasted eleven minutes. Meera read the first page of the fox story aloud. Arjun held the torch under his chin and announced he was a ghost. Her mother, who had spent three days pretending not to understand why anyone would move Christmas, made the hot chocolate exactly to the instructions and counted the marshmallows twice.

When Priya got home at a quarter past eight, both twins were asleep in the new pyjamas, one of them still holding the torch. She stood in the doorway for a while. It was, she decided, a very good Christmas Eve, just watched from further away than usual.

25 December, 1pm

Christmas lunch on the ward

Hospitals do Christmas quietly and seriously. The charge nurse had booked a Christmas catering company in October, and at noon the trays arrived at the staff entrance: turkey and roast vegetables, a chicken biryani, a vegetarian curry, salads and a very large tray of mince pies, every tray labelled with its allergens. Nobody had time to sit down together, so people ate in pairs, in shifts, in the staff room, still listening for the monitors.

The team that day came from eight countries. Somebody had brought crackers. A doctor from Glasgow wore his paper crown through an entire ward round, and the family of a patient in bed four asked whether they could have one too. Priya thought about her own children, who were at that moment being taken to the beach by their grandmother, and found that she minded much less than she had expected.

26 December

Boxing Day, which in Dubai is a Saturday

In the country her colleague from Glasgow came from, Boxing Day is a bank holiday. In Dubai in 2026 it was simply a Saturday, and Priya worked it. At home, the twins were given a job to keep them from the presents: make everything the table would need.

They made crowns from gold card and stapled them to size. They made place cards for four people and one for the grandmother’s phone, so that Uncle Rohan in Kochi could join on a video call. They made a sign for the front door that said CHRISTMAS IS TOMORROW, in case the delivery rider was confused. Their grandmother bought crackers from the supermarket and a jar of cranberry sauce, because she had read about it and wished to be thorough.

27 December, 4pm

Christmas on the twenty-seventh

Priya slept late, for the first time in a month. The presents were opened at eleven, in pyjamas. At four, the roast arrived in two paper bags, chilled and carved, with a printed sheet of reheating times that she followed to the minute: meat covered in foil, potatoes on their own tray so they would crisp again, gravy on the hob. The apartment oven was small, so she reheated in two rounds and kept the first warm under a tea towel.

They ate at the coffee table, because the dining table was covered in wrapping paper, with Uncle Rohan propped against the water jug on a phone. Everyone wore a crown. Arjun had three helpings of gravy. Meera pulled a cracker with her grandmother and won, and read out the joke twice because nobody laughed the first time.

Outside, the city was on the last afternoon of its weekend. Inside, it was entirely Christmas.

The following November

What the twins remembered

When the next roster went up, Priya had the twenty-fifth off. She told the twins, expecting delight, and was met instead by a negotiation. Could they still have Christmas Eve in a box? Could the roast come in paper bags again? And could they make the crowns, even if it was the real Christmas?

Children, it turns out, do not remember the date. They remember the torch, the gravy and the sign on the door. The twenty-seventh had not been a lesser Christmas. It had been theirs.

So the next year, with everyone at home on the right day, there was still a box on the twenty-fourth, still a roast in paper bags and still a sign on the front door. Priya had expected to feel she was making up for something. Instead she found she had started a tradition, and that her children, like most children, were far more loyal to their traditions than to the calendar.