The Nassau Events We Look Forward to Every Holiday Season
Dining & Lifestyle By Ceron Rolle, Broker & Founder, Rolle Realty Group September 26, 2026
Dining & Lifestyle By Ceron Rolle, Broker & Founder, Rolle Realty Group September 26, 2026
There is a point every year when Nassau begins to feel a little different.
The heat hasn’t entirely left us, and there are certainly no autumn leaves, but by late September the calendar begins filling up again. Paradise Plates comes around, the theatre season gets underway at the Dundas, and before long we are making plans for Jollification and wondering how Christmas managed to get here so quickly.
For our family, these events have become markers in the year. Some we look forward to with friends, others are family traditions, and a few have been part of Nassau life for so long that the season would feel slightly incomplete without them.
If you are new to Nassau, spending your first extended season here or thinking about making The Bahamas home, these are some of the events we think are worth putting on your calendar.
Paradise Plates has been part of Nassau’s social calendar since 2009, bringing together dozens of the island’s chefs and beverage purveyors for one very full evening at Atlantis. This year’s event takes place on September 26 at the Imperial Ballroom, with proceeds supporting the work of Hands for Hunger.
It is one of those nights when you go intending to taste a few things and inevitably spend just as much time stopping to talk to people you know. There is no seated dinner to commit to. You wander, discover a restaurant you haven’t tried before, go back for another bite from the table you liked best and somehow find room for dessert.
We also appreciate that the evening supports work happening here at home. Hands for Hunger’s programmes address food insecurity while rescuing food that might otherwise go to waste, which gives the night a purpose beyond being one of Nassau’s better food events.
If you have never seen a performance at the Dundas Centre for the Performing Arts, this is a lovely reason to finally go.
Shakespeare in Paradise was established in 2009 and has become an annual international theatre festival with Bahamian work sitting comfortably alongside productions from elsewhere in the Caribbean and beyond. Its Short Tales programme has also created an important space for new Bahamian writers and emerging directors.
There is something about seeing theatre at the Dundas that still feels wonderfully Nassau. It is intimate and familiar, and chances are you will recognise someone in the audience, on the stage or both.
For someone settling into life here, it is also a good introduction to a part of Bahamian culture that visitors can easily miss. There is a rich creative community beyond the festivals and traditions for which the country is best known, and the Dundas has been part of it for generations.
We have been going to the International Cultural Festival for years, and if you have children, this is an easy one to add to the family calendar.
The food is a large part of the fun. Countries and cultural communities from around the world set up booths, and our approach has always been to go hungry and share so that everyone gets to try a little of everything.
What I enjoy most is how naturally the festival reflects the Nassau we actually live in. The Bahamas may be a small country, but the people who call it home have roots stretching throughout the Caribbean and across the world. For a weekend, you get to experience some of those cultures through the dishes people cook, the music they play and the traditions they are proud to share.
It is busy, sometimes wonderfully chaotic, and particularly good with children because there is always something else for them to see or taste.
The Bahamas Culinary & Arts Festival is a newer addition to the calendar, but it has grown quickly. The fifth anniversary takes place at Baha Mar from October 21 through 25 this year, with dinners, tastings, demonstrations and experiences spread across the resort.
What makes the weekend interesting for us is the mix of international names and Bahamian talent. You can choose one dinner or make a weekend of it, depending on how interested you are in food.
I would also make time for FUZE Caribbean Art Fair, particularly if Caribbean art is something you enjoy or are beginning to collect. FUZE brings artists and galleries from across the region to Nassau and runs alongside the culinary programme from October 21 through 25.
The combined Culinary Expo and FUZE Art Fair takes place on October 24, making that a particularly good day to visit if you want a little of both.
Jollification is when Christmas begins to feel close for me. Hosted each year by the Bahamas National Trust, Christmas Jollification has become one of Nassau’s most beloved holiday traditions. It takes place beneath the trees at The Retreat Garden National Park, where you can spend the day wandering through the gardens, browsing work from Bahamian artists and artisans, finding Christmas gifts and, inevitably, stopping for something to eat.
The 2026 Jollification takes place November 21 and 22, from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., with the traditional Members’ Night kicking off the weekend on Friday, November 20.
I particularly like it for Christmas shopping because so much of what you find comes from Bahamian makers. There is something much nicer about giving someone a piece of art, something handmade or a locally produced find that has a story attached to it.
The Retreat is also part of why we return. Under the canopy of mature palms and native trees, Jollification has a character that is completely its own.
If this is your first Christmas living in Nassau, put it on the calendar.
Tingsmas is a younger Nassau tradition and has quickly become another good place to look for Christmas gifts made here at home.
Created by I Is A Bahamian Bey, the market brings together Bahamian makers and small businesses with plenty to eat along the way. It has a younger, distinctly local personality and tends to turn up the sort of gifts you probably would not have found by walking through a conventional shopping centre.
This is where we would look for something with a little bit of Bahamian humour or personality attached to it, especially for the person on the Christmas list who already has everything.
And then Christmas arrives, which in Nassau means Junkanoo is very close behind it.
For Bahamians, the memories start early. There is the childhood lore of being awake in the wee hours of the morning, bundled off downtown when you would ordinarily have been fast asleep. There is the group you pull for, a distinction often handed down through families almost like a birthright. In ours, there is no question: Who are we? The Valley.
Then there is the sound. You hear Junkanoo before you see it. The cowbells in the distance, the whistles and horns, and beneath it all, the bass drum. There is something almost ancestral about that beat, a rhythm that seems to carry the heartbeat of generations before us. When a group finally turns onto Bay Street after months of preparation, with hundreds of people rushing together beneath towering costumes of cardboard, crepe paper, feathers and fringe, it is difficult to describe what it feels like to be there.
Junkanoo is spectacle, certainly, but for many Bahamians it is also deeply personal. It is home. And somehow that feeling transcends nationality. You do not need to have grown up here, know the songs or understand the rivalries to be completely swept up in it.
If you can get access to a balcony overlooking Bay Street, wonderful. Our favourite seats, though, are just west of Rawson Square, close enough to a feel part of everything. You are still low enough to get brushed by a feather as a costume passes, to catch the expressions on the rushers’ faces and to become involved in the good-natured arguments happening around you about which group looks the “prettiest” and whose music sounds best.
Television does a wonderful job of bringing the parade into Bahamian homes, but Junkanoo is something you should experience from Bay Street at least once.
And if you grew up here, you already know the Christmas Day conversation: who is going downtown, who is going to sleep first and who insists they are only closing their eyes for an hour.
One of my favourite things about the final months of the year is how much of Nassau you end up experiencing simply by following the calendar.
You find yourself at the Dundas one evening, eating your way around Paradise Plates another, wandering through The Retreat looking for Christmas gifts a few weeks later and eventually standing somewhere along Bay Street listening for the next Junkanoo group.
These events become part of the rhythm of living here, and over the years you begin to attach memories to them. You remember who you went with, what the children loved, what you bought and the people you unexpectedly ran into.
When we talk to clients about making Nassau home, this is part of the story we enjoy sharing. A community tells you where you will live. Getting to know the traditions and places around it tells you much more about what life here can feel like.
These are some of the dates we make room for in ours.
And if you see us at Jollification, there is a very good chance we will already have a shopping bag in one hand and something to eat in the other.
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