It’s the most wonderful time of the year — for a proposal! The holiday season delivers a feeling of magic and wonder, offering the perfect backdrop for stars to pop the question or marry their significant others.
“When you know, you know, and we knew right away — like, very quickly,” Joe Manganiello told Haute Living in 2015 when recalling how he proposed to now-wife Sofia Vergara on Christmas Eve 2014. The couple, who began dating six months before their engagement, were on vacation in Hawaii when the True Blood alum asked the former Modern Family actress to marry him.
“We had this big bay window [that I opened] and the sun was going down pink over the mountains and over the bay, and I had this ring,” Manganiello explained. “I had looked at every ring in the world, and this is the ring that I wanted. I had a whole speech prepared in Spanish. I proposed to her on one knee in Spanish with the sun going down. It was awesome.”
Matthew McConaughey’s proposal to wife Camila Alves on Christmas Day 2011 was just as memorable, if not a little nerve-racking.
“I remember hitting the knee, looking into her eyes, and … I remember her face. I remember this smile coming up from her feet. I remember her having to catch her breath,” the Oscar winner told Esquire five years later. “And she didn’t say yes right away. And then the whole family was going, ‘Jesus, she’s gonna say no.’”
Fortunately, not only did Alves accept, but the two wed one year one year after their engagement. They share three children: Levi, born in 2008, Vida, born in 2010, and Livingston, born in 2012.
Despite the festivity and romance of the holidays, some stars’ Christmastime marriages did not end up working out.
Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman tied the knot on Christmas Eve 1990 at a ski resort in Colorado. The Eyes Wide Shut stars adopted daughter Isabella, born in 1992, and son Connor, born in 1995, but their relationship wasn’t meant to be. The actors ultimately split in 2001, with the Big Little Lies alum later reflecting on what went wrong.
“I was willing to give up everything,” Kidman told Vanity Fair in 2002 about her marriage to Cruise. “I now see that as part of me. I’m willing to do that — I do it when I do a movie too. I’m willing to go, ‘Yeah, bring it on, consume me, intoxicate me.’ I want to feel alive — I want to reel, basically. I was reeling with Tom and I loved it and I would have walked to the end of the earth. That meant giving up a lot of things that were very important to me.”
Keep scrolling to see more stars who got engaged or married on Christmas.