The first days of 2026 in Dubai tend to exist slightly outside of time. The calendar has moved on, but the city hasn’t fully followed yet. Mornings start late, plans stay vague, and most decisions are made on the day.

What you do can range from staying on the sofa, doing absolutely nothing and letting the time dissolve into idleness, to (for the braver ones) actually leaving the house and exploring a few new places. Somewhere between those two extremes, the first days of the year usually settle in.

Here are a few options: things to watch, places to eat, exhibitions to drift into, all meant to ease you into the year rather than push you forward.

Before you do anything else, it is a good moment to catch up on the new season of Stranger Things if you haven’t yet. The final episode airs on January 1, so expect plenty to talk about.

If you want to lean into winter-break comfort fully, just put on something familiar. Home Alone is the obvious choice, but it is also prime time for Harry Potter, Love Actually, The Holiday, Klaus, or anything else you have seen enough times to half-watch while doing absolutely nothing.

Once you finally make it out from under the blanket, it is time to think about food.

A good place to start is Ourdough (HEAL, 30 Al Manara Road, Umm Suqeim), which has settled into the courtyard at HEAL for the winter. Nothing complicated here — just fresh, oven-warm organic flatbreads topped with local produce, plus hot chocolate and a small lineup of desserts that make lingering feel inevitable. It is relaxed, low-effort, and exactly the kind of place you end up staying longer than planned.

If you are leaning sweet, Rascals Bake House (Wasl Square, Block 7) has gone all in on festive baking. Meet their winter pastries: cinnamon and ginger croissants, Christmas bougatsa, stollen, mini cookies, and Christmas tree cake. It is a limited run, and very much a “grab it while it’s still around” situation.

Then, there is carine (Emirates Golf Club, Al Thanyah Third, Emirates Hills 2) at Emirates Golf Club. Chef Izu Ani created a new bar menu. The dishes are familiar but thoughtful: a delicate truffle tart, salmon tartare with mandarin dressing, spicy calamari, seafood croquettes, and a baked goat cheese take on panzanella. If you want something more filling, there is marinated baby chicken or paccheri with bolognese. Add good fries, a passion fruit cheesecake, and views across the golf course, and it is hard to rush anything here. The whole point is not to.

And for slower mornings or late-afternoon pauses, STIR Coffee (Jumeirah Village Triangle) has introduced a small winter drinks menu that fits the season perfectly: peppermint matcha (hot or iced), gingerbread latte, and a rich hot chocolate that feels especially right once the temperature dips.

And don’t forget to make it to Tezukuri (if you haven’t already), opened in late November at The Courtyard by Neha Mishra, the chef behind Kinoya, and Panchali Mahendra, CEO of Atelier House Hospitality.

It is essentially two spaces in one. At the front, a small counter where temaki is rolled right in front of you — slow, precise, and very much about watching the process as much as tasting the food. Behind a discreet door, there is a hidden 10-seat listening bar. It is intimate, low-key, and deliberate: you eat with attention, then slip into a room where the music isn’t background noise but the main event.

So, this part is for the bravest. If you still have the energy — and the will to explore — the art galleries have plenty to offer.

At the Jameel Arts Centre, Mohammad Alfaraj’s Seas are sweet, fish tears are salty is on view until January 4. The exhibition centres on Al-Ahsa’s historic water channels — treated not as infrastructure, but as veins. Alfaraj layers photographs of the region with images of these ancient systems, quietly restoring their presence and importance.

At Leila Heller Gallery, The Wild Within (on view until January 8) by Ryan Koopmans and Alice Wexell takes over one of the largest gallery spaces in the area. The duo works with photographs of real architectural sites, digitally inserting plants, flowers and movement into these rigid structures.

The result is immersive and slightly uncanny. These are places that feel familiar — grand buildings, empty halls — but nature is quietly reclaiming them. It is visually striking, but also oddly meditative, especially when you give yourself time to notice the details rather than just the spectacle.

A quieter counterpoint comes with Naqsh Raj’s solo exhibition Half Light, running until January 8 at XVA Gallery. It is a show built around restraint: grids soften, colours hover rather than assert themselves, and each work feels like a pause — something suspended between day and night.

It is the kind of exhibition that doesn’t rush you. There is no need to understand everything right away — you just stand there, let your eyes adjust, and allow the paintings to unfold slowly.

Also worth circling back to a few exhibitions we have already talked about in different articles — they are still on view in early January.

Until January 4, Aliyah Alawadhi’s Girl Parts remains on view at Bayt Al Mamzar. It is a show that doesn’t treat childhood as nostalgia. Instead, it feels like a half-remembered sensation.

Alawadhi’s painted figures glow in pinks and creams, their bodies distorted, expressive, and insistently feminine. Kitchens turn into stages of appetite, domestic interiors slip into something closer to fantasy. These are not innocent scenes, but reworkings of what “girlhood” absorbs early on: beauty, shame, desire, and expectation. There is humour here, but also anger and magic, and a sense of reclaiming a language that was never neutral to begin with.

And at Jameel Arts Centre, running through January and February, Self-portrait with a cat I don’t have is Bady Dalloul’s first institutional solo show in the UAE.

The title comes from a small self-portrait he made in Tokyo and already says a lot about how the exhibition works — moving back and forth between his own life and the lives of people he has encountered along the way. The show brings together drawings, books, matchboxes and other small objects that end up carrying much bigger stories. In Age of Empires, a new series on paper, he reflects on imperial power using a 19th-century Japanese astrology manual; elsewhere, tiny drawings tucked into matchboxes catch everyday scenes, news fragments and political moments, many tied to Syria, where his family is from.

During the first week of 2026, Cinema Akil keeps the festive mood going with a couple of familiar holiday films. Elf stars Will Ferrell as a fully grown man raised by elves at the North Pole. And The Polar Express follows a child on a nighttime train ride to the North Pole, leaning into a quieter, more dreamlike version of holiday magic. Check the schedule on the website for screening times.