Disclaimer: This article is not intended to be a recommendation. The author is not responsible for any resulting actions of the company during your trading experience. The information provided in this article may not be accurate or up-to-date. Any trading or financial decision you make is your sole responsibility, and you must not rely on any information provided here. We do not provide any warranties regarding the information on this website and are not responsible for any losses or damages incurred as a result of trading or investing.
Here’s an uncomfortable truth we’ve learned from a few years of helping companies with corporate gifts Dubai teams receive in December: the gift is rarely what people remember. What they remember is whether they felt seen. A great gift with no thought behind it lands flat. A modest one with a real thank you can stay with someone for years.
So before you choose what to give, it’s worth thinking about how to say it.
- Be specific
“Thanks for all your hard work this year” is fine. It’s also what every email signature says in December. Compare it with “Thank you for staying calm when the system went down in June, the client noticed.” That second sentence takes a manager two minutes to write and does more than any wrapping paper.
**Tip:** ask each manager for two specific lines per person before the gifts go out. Make it a step in the process, not an optional extra, or it won’t happen.
- Give people a choice
Your team is not one person. Someone wants a quiet spa morning, someone else wants to drive a buggy across the dunes, and the new parents mostly want a dinner where nobody throws food. Letting people choose for themselves is the simplest way to show you know they’re individuals.
That’s why gifts that can be exchanged work so well. As one Google reviewer put it: “I love that the gifts can also be exchanged for another option if something else is more suitable for the recipient.”
- Don’t let budget decide the feeling
You don’t need a big budget to do this well. There are plenty of employee Christmas gifts under AED 250 that feel generous rather than token. What makes a gift feel small isn’t the price, it’s when it’s clearly bought in bulk with no thought.
- Timing matters more than you think
In the UAE, a big part of the team flies home in December. Give gifts in the first or second week, while everyone’s still around, and ideally in person. A gift that arrives by email on the 23rd while half the office is at the airport says “we remembered at the last minute” (even when you didn’t).
- Remember the people who are easy to forget
Contractors, part-timers, the colleague on maternity leave, the team in the other emirate. Including them costs very little and tells everyone else something important about your company.
What it can lead to
One of our favourite Google reviews came from someone who’d received a gift from work: “I received a voucher from a colleague for a night through Ithara.ae… we really had a great time.” That’s the whole goal, really. Not a box on a desk, but a good memory that someone links back to their team.
The honest bit
A Christmas gift won’t fix a hard year. Nothing will. But a sincere, specific thank you, with a gift that respects people’s own taste, goes a lot further than most companies expect. And it’s one of the nicest jobs HR gets to do all year.
