Hoda Kotb Reveals She’s Spending Christmas With Ex Joel Schiffman

Hoda Kotbwho was a bachelor Joel Schiffman joins in celebrating his family’s Christmas 2024.

“For us, our Christmas is not big because it’s me, my kids, my mom, my sister, Joel,” Kotb shared on the Tuesday, December 24, episode Today With Hoda & Jennapreviously recorded. “We meet. That’s a team, and it’s just kind of a cozy Christmas. So, we’re going to give out cookies tonight to Santa and carrots. She’s always been a big fan of cookies.”

Kotb shares two of her daughters — Haley, 7, and Hope, 5 — with Schiffman, 66. The women 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 welcomed Themba. However, Kotb revealed in the January 2022 episode of Hoda & Jenna that the couple decided to call it quits after eight years together.

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

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

Hoda Kotb is feeling short on the festivities going into her first Christmas in her new home. “Everything is possible! Merry Everything!!🥰,” the Today coanchor, 60, wrote on Instagram on Sunday, December 22, alongside a collection of festive photos, the first slide featuring a picture of her living room decor. Hanging at Kotb […]

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

“I’m very happy because hanging the socks in a place that you know will be a place where they will be hanging for years – we just, for the first time, decided where the tree will go, and we know. from today on, that’s where it’s going to go – all these good things,” he told his partner, Jenna Bush Hager. “We decorated our house, like all those kinds of nice things.”

Kotb went on to note that his new house started to feel like home after hosting his first Thanksgiving event in the area last month. “The fact that we all sat together at the table, and I think about that at Christmas,” she said. (Schiffman was not included in the Instagram photos Kotb shared of his Thanksgiving celebration.)

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

“Everything is possible! Merry Everything!!🥰,” Kotb captioned the photos, which include a selfie of herself getting hit in the face by a snowball while playing outside with Haley, Hope, and her mom, Sameha.

Bush Hager, 43, shared his holiday plans on Tuesday’s episode of Hoda & Jennasaying that it is a “tradition” of his family to go to his 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 the city, it was great for my kids because they didn’t know – I remember when Mila was 2 years old, she was going, ‘There’s no stroller! There is no carriage!’ because he had never seen an insect before,” he joked. “And father [former President George W. Bush] it was like, ‘Oh, Jenna. You’ll need to take him out.’ So, we go outside, we walk, we hang. It’s just delicious. And then, the singers come from this local church and sing, like, ‘Oh Happy Day,’ which is my dad’s favorite. He wants it at his funeral.”