How many days until Black Friday?

The shopping event that the rest of the world calls Black Friday exists here too, on exactly the same day — the Friday after the American Thanksgiving, in the last week of November — but most retailers in the Emirates run it under a different name. White Friday is the one you will see across the large chains and marketplaces, with a few using yellow or green instead, because the colour black does not carry the same associations in Arabic-language marketing.

The timing puts it in an unusually dense stretch of the local calendar. It falls days before Commemoration Day on 1 December and National Day on the 2nd and 3rd, which bring their own promotions and a public holiday break, so the retail season effectively runs from the last week of November into the second week of December without a pause.

It has also stopped being a single day. The larger platforms open several days early and continue into the following week, which means a countdown to the nominal Friday is now a countdown to the peak rather than to the beginning of anything.

Because the date depends on the position of the fourth Thursday in November, it shifts within a week-long window each year, and the countdown recalculates it rather than assuming a fixed date.