For those of us who did not live in temperate climes, and that is most of us, the winter solstice is a big moment. Especially in the northern hemisphere, where the days are about to get longer.

The winter solstice generally is December 21, and it was, here in Abu Dhabi. It was the shortest day of the year — approximately 10 hours and 38 minutes. Meaning the night was 13 hours and 22 minutes, a difference of nearly three hours.

That’s nothing, of course, compared to northern Eurasia, where days get down to about six or seven hours, in places like Paris and London and Moscow.

Humans have been noticing/celebrating the winter solstice for a long time. In this hemisphere, it meant the sun was coming back (I mean, you never knew for sure) … and the land would revive, and crops could be grown, and a harvest stored up so that you wouldn’t starve in the next winter.

It was a celebration, then. And a good case can be made that Christmas, which follows shortly after the solstice, was a day early Christians adapted Jesus’s birth to, to match up with preexisting celebrations of the return of the sun.

We celebrated in a way, here. Though it mattered most that we had the day off. Which ended with a trip to the latest posh Abu Dhabi mall, the poshest of them all, as far as I can tell.

That would be The Galleria at Sowwah Square, which has opened recently on Maryah Island, a sandspit from Abu Dhabi Island.

Here are hundreds of photos of the place, and this describes the mall a little. Note the reference to how it is “designed to become Abu Dhabi’s premium shopping and dining destination”.

That means lots and lots of stuff you don’t need to live, stuff which requires that you have money you don’t need.

So, we walked through that; I don’t really window shop, because I appear to have some sort of immunity to luxury.

But it was interesting to see the giant Christmas tree in the lobby of the mall in a Muslim country, and some entertainment had been arranged out on the seaside promenade — some jugglers and acrobats and dancers, and a little carousel.

It was almost cold (!) because of the breeze. Low 70s, even. Crazy cold.

A batch of restaurants have opened, as well, many of them with extended shisha smoking areas. It is illegal to operate a shisha concession near someone’s residence, which is a problem on most of Abu Dhabi Island, but no one actually lives on Maryah Island.

We picked a Moroccan resto, Almaz by Momo, which is related to the “404” resto in Paris.

It was fairly good, and quite nice in delivering Moroccan cuisine, which is not at all the regular hummus and roast chicken of most of the Levant. The service was decent, too, which is high praise in this service-starved part of the world. We would go back.

Now, ever day is going to be longer than the last till June 21, and in Abu Dhabi you can’t help but think of the long, long summer.

So in a way, the winter solstice is a time of mourning, or should be, in this part of the world. Summer is no longer receding … it’s coming back.