Carina Bergfeldt was asked by SVT program director Eva Beckman this summer and has been looking forward to it ever since.
I was incredibly happy. Eva Beckman called and I was sitting at a rooftop restaurant looking out over Stockholm with my husband, who took out his phone and started filming. And I just sat there chuckling and said yes, says Carina Bergfeldt, laughing.
Carina Bergfeldt knows that being the Christmas host is a special assignment. Christmas is a positive time for many, but hard for others.
To be the person who, in some way, can be a safe haven and make people feel for a moment that it can be a nice time, even if they find Christmas difficult - for me, it’s really nice to be able to do that.
Carina Bergfeldt has a six-year-old son, but did not hesitate to swap Christmas at home for the SVT studios at Gärdet in Stockholm.
He doesn't really know that it's Christmas Eve. We'll celebrate Christmas Eve on another day. But he'll be with me here at SVT for a little while, my son, along with my husband. So they'll run around behind the scenes a bit on Christmas Eve, she says.
Easy choice
For SVT program director Eva Beckman, the choice was easy.
Carina is a journalist with a completely unique connection with the audience. She makes TV that moves people, and she's quite unique in her own way, I think. I think you'll love celebrating Christmas with Carina Bergfeldt, she tells TT.
There will be plenty of music on Christmas Eve, and the theme of Carina Bergfeldt's hosting will be stories.
I like hearing stories. So I hope viewers will get some insight into things they perhaps didn't know.
No revenge
This year, Carina Bergfeldt's talk show on SVT was canceled as part of cost-cutting measures. But she doesn't want to see hosting the Christmas show as revenge.
I don't know if it's revenge. It's definitely a really fun assignment to have in the fall. I usually have a talk show in the fall, and now it didn't happen this fall.
But this isn't a damn shame, she says, laughing.
What do you think?