Hoda Kotb Reveals She Is Spending Christmas With Ex Joel Schiffman

Hoda Kotb‘ ex-fiancé Joel Schiffman joins in her family’s Christmas 2024 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 and Jennapre-recorded. “We come together. That’s the group, and it’s kind of just a cozy Christmas. So, we will be giving out cookies tonight for Santa and the carrots. He always seems to like the cookies more.”

Kotb shares it two daughters – Haley, 7, and Hope, 5 – with Schiffman, 66. The exes dated quietly 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 Hoda and Jenna that the pair have decided to call it quits after eight years together.

“We decided that we want to start this new year and start it on our new path as loving parents to our lovely, lovely children and as friends,” he explained on air at the time. “And it’s not like something happened. They sometimes say that relationships are meant to be there for a reason, for a season or for life. And I feel ours is meant to be there for a season.”

Related: Hoda Kotb Today Shows Off Her Suburban Home’s Christmas Decorations

Hoda Kotb feels short of Christmas as she arrives for her first Christmas in her new home. “It’s all happening! Happy Everything!! 🥰,” coangor Today, 60, wrote via Instagram on Sunday, December 22, alongside a carousel of festive photos, the first slide of which included a look at her living room’s holiday decor. Hanging from Kotb’s (…)

Schiffman’s inclusion in the holidays this year is special as this is the first Christmas Kotb her daughters will spend in their new suburban home. (Kotb announced in March that she and her children move outside of New York City.)

“I’m so excited because stockings are being hung in a place that you know is going to be where they’re going to be hanging for years – we, for the first time, decided where the tree goes, and we know from this day forward, this is where it’s going – all these cool things,” she told her co-host, Jenna Bush Hager. “We decluttered our house, like all those kinds of neat things.”

Kotb went on to notice that her new house was starting to feel like home after her held his first Thanksgiving in space last month. “The fact that we are all sitting at a table together, and I imagine that at Christmas time too,” he said. (Schiffman did not appear Instagram photos Kotb shared from her Thanksgiving celebration.)

Kotb teased Schiffman’s involvement in her Christmas plans over the weekend. Sharing Instagram photos of her home’s holiday decorations, a sock with the name “Dad” was displayed among the rest of the family’s stockings hanging over the fireplace in Kotb’s living room.

“It’s all happening! Happy 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, Together.

Bush Hager, 43, shared her own holiday plans on Tuesday’s episode Hoda and Jennanoting that it is her family’s “tradition” to travel to her home state of Texas for Christmas. (She is shares children Mila, 11, Poppy, 9, and Hal, 5, with her husband, Henry Hager.)

“We’re out in the open. Especially when we lived here in the city, it was so good for my children because they didn’t know — I remember when Mila was 2, she would go, ‘No buggy! No buggy!’ because she had never seen a bug before,” he joked. “And my father (former President George W. Bush) was like, ‘Oh, Jenna. You’ll need to get her out in the open.’ So, we go outdoors, we walk, we hang. It’s just fun. And then, carolers come from this local church and they sing, like, ‘O Happy Day,’ which is my father’s favourite. He wants it at his funeral.”