Hoda Kotb reveals that she is spending Christmas with ex Joel Schiffman

Hoda Kotbs ex-fiancée Joel Schiffman is at his family’s Christmas celebration in 2024.

“For us, our Christmas isn’t huge, because it’s me, my kids, my mom, my sister, Joel,” Kotb shared on the Tuesday, Dec. 24, episode of Today with Hoda & Jennawhich was pre-recorded. “We get together. It’s the group, and it’s kind of just a cozy Christmas. So, we’re putting cookies out tonight 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. Ex quietly dated 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 of Hoda & Jenna which the couple had decided to quit after eight years together.

“We decided that we are going to start this new year and start it on our new path as loving parents to our adorable, adorable children and as friends,” she explained at the time. “And it’s not like anything 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.”

Family: Today’s Hoda Kotb shows off her suburban home’s Christmas decorations

Hoda Kotb feels a lack of celebration heading into her first Christmas in her new home. “Everything happens! Merry Everything!!,” the Today anchor, 60, wrote via Instagram on Sunday, Dec. 22, alongside a carousel of festive photos, the first of which featured a peek at her living room’s holiday decor. Hanging from Kotbs (…)

Schiffman’s inclusion in this year’s holiday festivities is special because it’s the first Christmas Kotb and her girls will spend in their new suburban home. (Kotb announced in March that she and her children were move outside of New York City.)

“I’m so excited to have stockings hanging in a place that you know will be the place where they will hang for years – we just decided for the first time where the tree was going to go, and we know from this day on where it’s going to go — all these cool things,” she told her co-host, Jenna Bush Hager. “We decorated our house, like, all these kinds of fancy things.”

Kotb went on to state that her new house began to feel like home after her host their first Thanksgiving in the space last month. “The fact that we were all sitting at a table together, and I imagine that at Christmas too,” she said. (Schiffman was not involved Instagram photos Kotb recounted his Thanksgiving celebration.)

Kotb teased Schiffman’s participation 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 socks hanging over Kotb’s living room fireplace.

“Everything is 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 his own holiday plans on Tuesday’s episode of Hoda & Jennaand says it’s 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’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 said, ‘No stroller! No stroller! because she had never seen a bug before,” she joked. “And my father (former Pres George W. Bush) was like, ‘Oh, Jenna. You have to get her outside. So, we go outdoors, we hike, we hang out. It’s just fun. And then singers come from this local church and they sing, like, “Oh Happy Day,” which is my dad’s favorite. He wants it at his funeral.”