The most international Spanish soprano confesses to embracing the Christmas spirit since the beginning of December and, a singer with a wonderful voice as she is, she inaugurates these holidays every year listening to the legendary album The Magic of Christmas by Nat King Cole. Like every year, she will spend Christmas Eve and Christmas with her father while she will enjoy New Year’s Eve in the best city to do so: New York. “I’m leaving for work and I’ll take the opportunity to be with friends whom I haven’t seen since before the pandemic,” she explains to La Vanguardia.

Although Ainhoa ??learned a lot during her time on MasterChef Celebrity 5, it is her ‘aita’ who cooks on Christmas Eve and the table is top-notch: lobster and turbot prepared with the mastery of old music teacher José Ramón Arteta. “I’m not a glutton, I like fish more than anything else. At the end of dinner we watch the Midnight Mass celebrated by Pope Francis. I used to go to church at night with my mother [who died in 2007] when she lived in San Sebastián. And she sang. But now I watch it on TV with my father, who is very daddy. Thank God I don’t have to put up with any party-bitter daughter-in-law, so calm down (laughs).”

The soprano relates that the next day she goes with her father to the town church to sing together at the Christmas mass. She does not expect big Christmas gifts, which in Euskadi she brings with the traditional Olentzero: “Look, from a certain age, the real gift is being able to see each other.”

And whoever wants to see her on stage, after her last concert of the year, this Friday the 22nd at the Gran Teatro de Huelva, 2024 begins full of projects: in addition to the opera Diálogos de Carmelitas, on January 4 she participates in the Gran New Year’s Zarzuela Solidarity Gala at the National Auditorium in Madrid, at the end of the month he will take Madama Butterfly to the Villamarta Theater in Jerez, in February he will be in the XXXV Lyric Season of Malaga and is preparing a world tour of recitals by Faure and Puccini for his hundredth anniversary.