Hoda Kotb Celebrates Thanksgiving With Sweet Family Photo

Hoda Kotb spent Thanksgiving hosting the annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in Herald Square in New York City. The Today anchor made sure to use the rest of the holiday to be with the ones she loves the most. On Thursday, Kotb, 57, surrounded her dinner table with her fiancé Joel Schiffman and their two daughters, Hope Catherine, 2, and Haley Joy, 4. She shared a snippet of one of the special moments in a sweet photo that she shared on her Instagram page.

“Hope your turkey day was everything xx,” she captioned the Instagram post. She showed off her big turkey for the occasion. She also shared snapshots of her time at the parade. “New Orleans IN THE HOUSE!!!!!! We KNOW how to do a parade!!!!” she captioned a video of a band. 

Kotb is most grateful for her children, as she’s been vocal about her journey to becoming a mother. She spoke of her journey on People Magazine’s new podcast Me Becoming Mom, noting that her journey was an emotional one.

“I was actually with a girlfriend and we were walking down a street and I remember it like it was yesterday,” she recalled. “Because I had never shared it with anyone that I had wanted — I still yearned for [having children] because it seemed like wanting to go to the moon, it’s not happening, so don’t even bring it up. So she said, ‘Well, neither of us really wanted to have children.’ I looked at her and I said, ‘Well, I do.’ I didn’t say did, I said I do. She looked at me and she goes, ‘What?’ I started crying. I said, ‘I do. I do.’ I said it out loud, ‘I do.’ It was so weird. It was an everyday moment that turned into an epiphany and I had never spoken it,” she added. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, I do want to have children, right now. Here in my current state.’”

Kotb later was able to fulfill her lifelong dream of motherhood through adoption with Schiffman. Kotb and Schiffman announced in Nov. 2019 that they were engaged. They first met in the summer of 2013 when Kotb was speaking at an event for Wall Street professionals. They went public with their relationship in 2015.