Kristin Chenoweth on Her Love of Guideposts

Hi everybody, I’m Kristin Chenoweth and we are here for the cover story of Guideposts magazine. And guess what? It’s Christmas too.

I grew up singing in church, so obviously Christmastime was a big time in our lives. I remember auditioning for the adult part in a Christmas, one of our Christmas stories, and my mom said, “These are just for the grownups.” And I said, “But I’m want to go”. And she said, “Okay”. So the song was, “Jesus, I Heard You Had A Big House, where there’s plenty of love to go ’round.” And I auditioned with this song and got it.

So here’s this little tiny girl coming up to sing, ♪ Jesus, I heard you had a big house, ♪ ♪ with plenty of love to go ’round. ♪ It’s so silly now that I think about it, but it really whet my appetite for being a musician and being the kind of musician that I want to be, and also, just remembering where I’m from and my faith.

Two of my very favorite Christmas traditions that we have in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, is we read the Christmas story out of the Bible. Right after that, we will open a present. So I don’t know what that says about my family, that we will read the story, the birth of Jesus, and then promptly open a present. But that’s what we do at my house.

It’s very easy to talk about what Guideposts means to me, since both my mother and my grandmother and all of my aunts read Guideposts. No matter where we were at in the house, you could find the latest edition. And one of my favorite sections in Guideposts magazine was bad things happening in real life, and how you can overcome it and how hope always wins. And it always fascinated me that they found these stories where the worst thing could happen and yet people overcame it. And that was the beginning of my love affair with Guideposts.