Joel Schiffman and Hoda Kotb
Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for timeHoda Kotb‘s ex-fiance Joel Schiffman will participate in her family’s Christmas celebrations in 2024.
“For us, our Christmas is not big, because it is me, my children, my mother, my sister Joel,” Kotb said in the episode of Tuesday, December 24 Today with Hoda and Jennawhich was pre-recorded. “We come together. That’s the group, and it’s really just a nice Christmas. So tonight we’re putting out cookies for Santa and the carrots. He always seems to like the cookies better.”
Kotb shares her two daughters — Haley, 7, and Hope, 5 — with Schiffman, 66. The exes dated quietly for two years before going public with their romance in 2015. After adopting Haley in 2017, Schiffman popped the question to Kotb in 2019: the same year they adopted Hope. However, Kotb revealed in a January 2022 episode Hoda & Jenna that the couple had decided to call it quits after eight years together.
“We have decided that we are going to start this new year and embark on our new path as loving parents to our adorable, beautiful children and as friends,” she explained on air at the time. “And it’s not like anything happened. They say that sometimes relationships are meant to be for a reason, for a season or for a lifetime. And I have a feeling ours would stay there for a season.
Hoda Kotb isn’t feeling festive as she faces her first Christmas in her new home. “It’s all happening! Merry Everything!!🥰,” the Today coanchor, 60, wrote via Instagram on Sunday, December 22, alongside a carousel of festive photos, the first slide of which offered a glimpse into her living room’s Christmas decor. Hanging on Kotb’s […]
Schiffman’s participation in this year’s Christmas festivities is special because it is the first Christmas Kotb and her girls will spend in their new home in the suburbs. (Kotb announced in March that she and her children were moving outside New York City.)
“I’m so excited because to have stockings hung in a place where you know it will be where they will hang for years to come – we just decided for the first time where the tree would go, and we know from this day this is where it’s going – all this cool stuff,” she told her cohost, Jenna Bush Hager. “We decorated our house with all these fun things.”
Kotb went on to note that her new house started to feel like a home after hosting her first Thanksgiving in the space last month. “The fact that we were all sitting at the table together, and that’s what I imagine at Christmas,” she said. (Schiffman was not featured in Instagram photos Kotb talked about her Thanksgiving celebration.)
Hoda with family.
Thanks to Hoda Kotb/InstagramKotb teased Schiffman’s participation in her Christmas plans this weekend. To share Instagram photos Among her home’s Christmas decorations, a stocking named “Daddy” was displayed among the rest of the family’s stockings hanging above the fireplace in Kotb’s living room.
“It’s all happening! Merry Everything!!🥰,” Kotb captioned the photos, which included a selfie of her getting hit in the face with a snowball while playing outside with Haley, Hope and her mom. Sameha.
Bush Hager, 43, shared her own vacation plans on Tuesday Hoda & Jennastating that it is her family’s “tradition” to travel to her home state of Texas for Christmas. (She shares children Mila, 11, Poppy, 9, and Hal, 5, with her husband, Henry Hager.)
“We are outside. Especially when we lived here in town, it was so good for my kids because they didn’t know. I remember when Mila was 2, she said, ‘No buggy! No buggy!’ because she had never seen an insect before,” she joked. ‘And my father [former President George W. Bush] said, “Oh, Jenna. You’ll have to take her outside.’ So we go outside, we walk, we hang. It’s just fun. And then carolers come from the local church and they sing “Oh Happy Day,” which is my dad’s favorite. He wants it at his funeral.”