Hoda Kotb’s final week on the Today show will end with a special celebration.
“You all know that Hoda’s last day is January 10, right? We’re celebrating you the whole week before. And today, we have a big announcement,” Jenna Bush Hager shared on the Wednesday, December 18, episode of Today With Hoda & Jenna. “We are having a ‘Hoda-bration’ for Hoda’s final show.”
In honor of the occasion, the special episode will be filmed in Rockefeller Plaza’s Studio 8G and feature a live studio audience. “There will be big surprises, lots of surprises that Hoda won’t even know about,” Bush Hager, 43, teased.
The news was brand-new to Kotb, 60, who remarked: “You guys, that’s awesome.” Bush Hager, for her part, was relieved she didn’t spill the secrets early. “I was scared I told you,” she noted. “I can’t remember what I’ve told or who I’ve told.”
Today fans can get the chance to join the “Hoda-bration” live audience by requesting tickets via the show’s website.
“We just really cannot wait to celebrate and send you [off],” Bush Hager stated. “I don’t know what’s gonna be happening with me because just talking about the ‘Hoda-bration’ brings tears to my eyes. So, we’re hoping we can do it and I can get out alive. But it’s gonna be a beautiful day. … We’re gonna start 2025 with an absolute bang.”
In addition to the “Hoda-bration” news, Bush Hager revealed that information about her upcoming Today With Jenna & Friends cohosts will be shared after the holidays.
Kotb announced her plans to step down from the NBC morning show back in September, citing turning 60 and wanting to spend more time with her kids as the main motivations behind her exit. (Kotb shares her daughters Haley, 7, and Hope, 5, with her ex-fiancé Joel Schiffman.)
“I just turned 60, and it was such a monumental moment for me when I turned 60 years old because I started thinking about that decade, like, what does that decade mean? What does it hold? What’s it gonna have for me?” she shared on the show’s September 26 episode. “And I realized that it was time for me to turn the page at 60 and to try something new.”
Following Kotb’s final episode on Friday, January 10, Craig Melvin will take over her role as Savannah Guthrie’s Today coanchor. Hoda & Jenna will be revamped into Today With Jenna & Friends and feature Bush Hager alongside a rotating lineup of guest hosts until a permanent replacement is picked.
Earlier this month, Bush Hager got teary-eyed while discussing Kotb’s impending Today departure, joking that she was in the “depression stage” of the grieving process. “Denial lasted a good month. Anger was last week when I tried to make you jealous with Gayle [King],” she quipped on the December 10 episode of Hoda & Jenna. “I’ve bargained with God basically every night for the last couple months. And now, I’ve hit depression, where she says one thing and [I cry].”
