"After spending long hours rehearsing and performing for my college's Colors of Christmas concert, I was stoked to be spending the evening with Bryce! I was so excited to be changed out of Christmas clothes and walking through the streets of downtown Omaha with the love of my life! (Christmas is by far my favorite time of the year. I start listening to my favorite song Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas in September and then randomly throughout the school year.) After walking for a while, we stopped to eat dinner at a french restaurant that I've already forgotten the name of, but I can definitely remember the taste! At the restaurant we ordered acorn squash soup and steak tar-tar (which by the way is not a huge, delicious steak that you can smoother in steak sauce. It's actually raw and served with an egg yolk). After we got our food and were eating for a while, Bryce kept getting up to go to the bathroom. I felt so bad because I figured he was feeling sick because of the raw meat (but he was only calling the photographer in the bathroom to make sure everything was in place for the proposal). After we finished the soup and decided to not finish the raw steak we walked down to the river by the metal slides. Christmas lights were EVERYWHERE! They were hanging from all the trees and along the fence. It was beautiful. Just when I thought it couldn't get any better, I saw SANTA out of the corner of my eye, SANTA! (This Santa though…was a little sketch. I kind of thought he was handing out drugs instead of presents.) However, Bryce insisted that we go and talk to Santa Clause, and surprisingly he happened to have a small gift for me! After taking the small box out of Santa's bag, Bryce grabbed it. He got down on one knee and asked me to spend the rest of my life with him, and of course, I said YES! Oh, and I awkwardly jumped a little bit."

- Brielle

"What you just read was Brielle's side of the story. It makes the night seem like the night went seamlessly and nothing could have possibly gone wrong, right? Wrong. Although the night was beautiful in about every way imaginable, it definitely did not go according to plan at all. Please allow me to tell you my stressful side of the story.

"Boo Yah!! The meeting with Mark and Patty Lang could not have gone any better! I sat down with them for coffee, and professed to them the love and respect I had for their daughter. I told them that my love has grown deeper every single day. After they had given their approval and stated that they would love to have me as a part of their family, they had me skipping my way out of the coffee shop. Now it was time to begin setting my plan into action. I had already ordered the perfect ring for Brielle and it should have been well on its way by now. Or so I thought. Only a few days later I got the phone call that they had lost my diamond in shipping and this would put my order on back order. I wanted to scream.

"This is unacceptable", I told the lady on the phone, "I need to have this ring by December 11!" I continued to repeat this same line as they continued to transfer me to different people up the company. Finally after talking to too many people to count, the manager of a section of the company was willing to pull some strings for me in order to get me my ring on time. And hence, I had passed my first hurdle.

"Some time had passed and after I had made all my plans for the evening I was starting to feel very good about how the night would look. My plan should go as smooth as a baby's bottom. The weekend of the proposal was approaching. I was planning on enacting the plan Saturday night, after Brielle's Christmas Concert at college. But then I woke up Friday morning and checked the weather forecast. I couldn't believe my eyes - 99% chances of rain for Saturday night. This couldn't work! The whole proposal is built around the beautiful outdoor Christmas lights! I can't have this! I ran back to the dorms to tell my Santa Clause of the last minute plan changes. "We have to do it tonight!!", I yelled as I ran into the room. But the reaction I received was not the reaction I expected to my urgent plea for help. My friend, the actor who was going to play Santa Clause, simply laid in bed. After a few seconds of watching him, he slowly rolled over and groaned, "Oahh... I'm really not feeling so w-." But before he could finish, he got up and sprinted to the trash can in the corner of the room and absolutely puked his brains out. Well great, I am definitely going to need a new Santa. Luckily for me, I have an awesome group of friends who were more than willing to help me with these problems. These guys are so awesome and I could not have made the proposal anything what it was without them.

"Awesome, we had the Santa Suit ready to go, now we only needed the GoPros to video tape it. We go to the library to check out some GoPros and - they're completely out. They've never ever been completely checked out of GoPros. What are the odds? But, again my friends save the day by digging out some old GoPros that they had won years ago at a Pheasant's Forever banquet. This was the first time they had ever used them.

"Now let's fast forward to later in the night. Things are going lovely and Brielle are sitting down in a French restaurant called Le Bouillon. Brielle already told you about the Steak Tartar that we had tried. Things were going fantastic until I got the text that my friends had gotten lost and didn't know where the site of the proposal was going to be (at that moment, it occurred to me that God was really making me work for this girl's hand in marriage). Long story short, I told Brielle that I had to use their fascilities and I went into the bathroom to figure what the heck was going on. Turns out, they didn't like the original planned proposal spot at all and wanted to change where I was going to do the proposal. Well, I agreed to changing the location based off of their descriptions and I then had to contact the photographer to notify him of the change as well.

"We then leave the restaurant to go to the planned spot. We walk through all the gorgeous Christmas lights until we finally come to the spot that my friends and I had agreed on - only there was no Santa Clause to be seen. The photographer was trying be unnoticed by nonchalantly taking pictures of objects. Where the poop is Santa? I then make the excuse that I have to go to the bathroom extremely bad and begin frantically looking for a bathroom (only trying to buy time for Santa). After we get a couple blocks away, I finally got the text that they had arrived. So I casually tell Brielle that my extreme case of diareha has suddenly disappeared and we should go back to the spot we just came from. I pulled Brielle back to the proposal location where we saw a Santa Clause walking around handing out presents to children! And then, well, you know the rest of the story..." : )

-Bryce