Siw Malmkvist Named 2025 Christmas Host

Published 13 Nov 2025 at 09:47Updated at 10.25am

Siw Malmkvist is this year’s Christmas host in SVT.

– It’s a warm feeling I get from being host on Christmas Eve this year, she says.

On Christmas Eve, SVT broadcasts for several hours. The programs are traditionally presented by a Christmas host, who is usually a popular profile.

This year it will be the artist Siw Malmkvist, 88, who will host Christmas. It is the first time Malmkvist takes on the role.

– It has been so very secretive and so very difficult to tell people that you are busy on Christmas Eve. You said it’s an honor to host Christmas, so I guess I’ll take it then. In any case, it’s a warm feeling I get from being the host on Christmas Eve this year, she says in connection with being presented in the SVT house on Thursday.

SVT’s program director Eva Beckman says that Malmkvist “spread joy in the box almost every year for as long as we have had television in Sweden”.

There was some hesitation before the profile accepted.

– It is Christmas Eve, says Siw to Expressen and says that she first spoke to her children.

– They thought it was a ball, they think this is fun. And then I said yes.

But it has been difficult to keep everything a secret.

– Very tricky, says Siw Malmkvist, who has had to parry requests and refuse, without being able to say why.

Previous hosts

Last year it was Mark Levengood who lit the candle and wished the viewers a Merry Christmas. The year before that, in 2023, it was comedian David Batra who took the chair.

The Christmas host of Christmas hosts, Arne Weise, accompanied the SVT viewers through Christmas Eve as many as 20 times between 1980 and 2002.

In the broadcast on Christmas Eve, several popular programs are shown, including Donald Duck’s Christmas and “The Tale of Karl-Bertil Jonsson’s Christmas Eve”.