Joel Schiffman and Hoda Kotb Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Time
Hoda Kotb’s ex-fiancé Joel Schiffman is joining in on her family’s 2024 Christmas celebrations.
“For us, our Christmas isn’t huge ‘cause it’s me, my kids, my mom, my sister, Joel,” Kotb shared on the Tuesday, December 24, episode of Today With Hoda & Jenna, which was pre-recorded. “We get together. That’s the group, and it’s kind of just a cozy Christmas. So, we’ll put out cookies tonight for Santa and the carrots. He always seems to like the cookies more.”
Kotb shares her two daughters — Haley, 7, and Hope, 5 — with Schiffman, 66. The exes quietly dated for two years before making their romance public in 2015. After adopting Haley in 2017, Schiffman popped the question to Kotb in 2019, the same year they adopted Hope. However, Kotb revealed on a January 2022 episode of Hoda & Jenna that the pair had decided to call it quits after eight years together.
“We decided that we are gonna start this new year and begin it on our new path as loving parents to our adorable, delightful children and as friends,” she explained on-air at the time. “And it’s not like something happened. They say sometimes relationships are meant to be there for a reason, for a season or for a lifetime. And I feel like ours was meant to be there for a season.”
Hoda Kotb is feeling short of festive heading into 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 featured a look at her living room’s holiday décor. Hanging from Kotb’s […]
Schiffman’s inclusion in this year’s holiday festivities is special as it’s the first Christmas Kotb and her girls will spend in their new suburban home. (Kotb announced in March that she and her kids were moving outside of New York City.)
“I’m so excited because to have stockings hung in a place that you know will be the place where they’re gonna be hanging for years — we just, for the first time, decided where the tree was gonna go, and we know from this day on, this is where it’s gonna go — all these cool things,” she told her cohost, Jenna Bush Hager. “We decked our house out, like, all those kinds of neat things.”
Kotb went on to note that her new house began to feel like a home after she hosted her first Thanksgiving in the space last month. “The fact that we all sat at a table together, and I’m imagining that at Christmas, too,” she stated. (Schiffman was not featured in Instagram pictures Kotb shared of her Thanksgiving celebration.)
Hoda with family. Courtesy of Hoda Kotb/Instagram
Kotb teased Schiffman’s participation in her Christmas plans over the weekend. Sharing Instagram pics of her home’s holiday decorations, a stocking with the name “Dad” was shown among the rest of the family’s stockings hung over Kotb’s living room fireplace.
“It’s all happening! Merry Everything!!🥰,” Kotb captioned the photos, which included a selfie of her being hit in the face with a snowball while playing outside with Haley, Hope, and her mother, Sameha.
Bush Hager, 43, shared her own holiday plans on Tuesday’s episode of Hoda & Jenna, stating it’s her family’s “tradition” to travel to her home state of Texas for Christmas. (She shares kids Mila, 11, Poppy, 9, and Hal, 5, with her husband, Henry Hager.)
“We’re outdoors. Especially when we lived here in the city, it was so good for my kids because they didn’t know — I remember when Mila was 2, she’d go, ‘No buggy! No buggy!’ because she’d never seen a bug before,” she joked. “And my dad [former President George W. Bush] was like, ‘Oh, Jenna. You’re gonna need to get her outdoors.’ So, we go outdoors, we hike, we hang. It’s just fun. And then, carolers come from this local church and they sing, like, ‘Oh Happy Day,’ which is my dad’s favorite. He wants it at his funeral.”
