Tabernacle Choir celebrates 20 years of Christmas broadcasts

The Tabernacle Choir and Orchestra at Temple Square is celebrating two decades of Christmas broadcasts with its upcoming two-hour anniversary retrospective program. PBS and family entertainment network BYUtv will air “20 Years of Christmas with The Tabernacle Choir” in mid-December.

Choir leadership and broadcast executives gathered with media at a New York City event on Wednesday, December 8, 2021, to celebrate this year’s Christmas special, hosted by Broadway legend and Tony Award-winner Brian Stokes Mitchell.

“I am honored to be a part of it. Not only will viewers enjoy a behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to produce the most-watched holiday special on PBS for 16 years, but they will also be able to feast on all of the wonderful moments this holiday special has delivered over the past two decades and remember how music connects people in very profound ways,” Mitchell said.

The special is copresented by GBH, the largest creator of PBS content for TV and the internet, and BYUtv, the television home of the Choir’s weekly program, “Music & the Spoken Word.”

“It is not easy to get two hours out of PBS during their prime-time schedule, and they were only too happy to do it because this is a program that our viewers really enjoy,” said John Bredar, GBH’s vice president of national programming.

The holiday broadcast replaces the traditional TV special, which would have been created from a live Christmas concert in 2020 that was canceled due to COVID restrictions. The anniversary special was produced by BYUtv.

“Being able to go back, look at the last 20 years, over 40 performers and really have all of that culminates in just a beautiful special every time, every year. We got this incredibly uplifting piece that is just about people coming together in a common purpose that music is just such a universal language for all of us,” said Andra Johnson Duke, BYUtv content director.

The Choir’s special will premiere on Monday, December 13, 2021, at 8:00 p.m. eastern standard time on PBS, PBS.org and the PBS Video app; and on Thursday, December 16, 2021, at 9:00 p.m. eastern standard time on BYUtv, BYUtv.org and the free BYUtv app.