Claim: Dubai celebrated Christmas with a massive Santa Claus light installation near the iconic Burj Khalifa.
Conclusion: The claim is false. Fawez Zayati, a VFX artist created this video 2 years ago in 2023. Similar claim appeared in 2024 too. There are no credible reports or proof that suggest such an event occurred near Burj Khalifa in Dubai for Christmas.
Rating: False — 
Several social media users have shared a clip claiming that Dubai celebrated Christmas in a grand manner with a massive Santa Claus installation. Verified X user ‘OurFavOnlineDoc’ claims a real “supersized Santa of electric lights” drone display occurred near Dubai’s Burj Khalifa to celebrate Christmas 2025, describing it as a beautiful event in a “sensible sane Islamic country.” The post gained more than 31,500 views and can be seen below –
Christmas lights in Dubai.
They did a full supersized Santa of electric lights to celebrate Christmas 🎄🎅🤶
This is so beautiful.
While extremist animals in my country are thinking of how to make it a shithole, this is a sensible sane islamic country.
pic.twitter.com/ojWkD82TZI— OurFaveOnlineDoc 🇬🇧 🇳🇬 (@OurFavOnlineDoc) December 26, 2025
Other users have shared similar claims that can be seen here and here. Elon Musk on December 26, 2025 requoted this same claim that gained around 79 million views on X.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 26, 2025
FACT CHECK
DigitEYE India decided to investigate this claim and found that it is false. There has been no such real event of a massive Santa Claus lighting in Dubai near the Burj Khalifa. The video is a visual effects (VFX) fabrication created by VFX artist Fawez Zayati, who has clarified its artificial nature in 2024.
Details:
We first conducted a reverse image search from various keyframes of the video to learn about the source. The search took us to an Instagram reel by the original creator, Fawez Zayati uploaded on January 20, 2024. He has broken down step by step how he made it and also spoke about how the video gained millions of views. View a screenshot of the post below –
Fawez Zayati has also urged people not to believe anything on the internet and said that he had the video taken down due to legal problems. He has uploaded screenshots of how the video reached around 18.8 million views by December 16, 2023. View a screenshot of this from the reel below:
Following this, we searched for any official reports from credible news outlets regarding this event but did not find any. Moreover, this same video has been uploaded in 2023 and 2024 which can be seen below and here and here respectively. This proves that it is an old clip created with VFX, or Visual Effects which is being re-circulated in a wrong context.
Thus, the claim is false and there has been no such event in Dubai.
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