A blushing bride was surprised by a heartfelt gesture from her dad when he wore a handcrafted paper tie she made as a child, aged 5, for their father-daughter dance. She had never believed her dad’s promise to wear the relic at her wedding and thought the tie had been lost years before.
The gesture brought her to tears on the dance floor.
Megan Becker-Towns tied the knot with Travis in their hometown of Appleton, Wisconsin, on Oct. 29, 2021. Megan made the paper tie for her father, Glenn, some 24 years prior in grade school.
“Father’s Day is in the summertime, so our last art project of the year was making paper ties,” Megan, now 29, told The Epoch Times. “They were laminated and had a string of yarn attached.
“When he opened it, he said he was so proud of it that he was going to wear it at my wedding. He hung it on his mirror in his bedroom throughout my entire childhood.
“Every once in a while, he would take it down, dust it off and say, again, that he was going to wear it at my wedding. I didn’t believe he truly would.”
“I was completely shocked,” she told The Epoch Times. “The only two people who knew of what was happening were my parents.
“Everyone had tears in their eyes; I started to cry in my dad’s arms.”
It transpired that Megan’s mother had packed the paper tie away when she and Glenn moved to Appleton from Oshkosh several years ago. Megan jokingly told her father that the tie wouldn’t make it to her wedding after all.
What she didn’t know at the time was that Travis had asked for Glenn’s permission to propose, and Glenn had retrieved the tie with a surprise in mind.
“He hunted it down,” said Megan. “He hid it in his tool chest in the garage, and told me it got ‘lost in the move.’”
Megan counts her father’s big reveal as one of her two favorite moments on her wedding day. The other, she said, was her husband’s face when he first saw her walking down the aisle, and his words: “You are so beautiful.”
Megan and Travis, 32, a plastics factory worker, met at the catalog company where Megan still works as an email marketing specialist. Both originally from Oshkosh, they just bought a home in Appleton.
The bride has always shared a close bond with her father, claiming he never missed a sports game or dance recital, took her fishing, painting, and “fixing things,” and is always there to make her life easier. One of her fondest memories is of her father giving her his coziest winter socks to warm her feet after fetching her from a school dance in the bitter cold.
Today, the dad-daughter duo’s time is best spent laughing, joking, and getting together for breakfast.
“He is honestly the best dad,” she said. “I have always been his sidekick. I have two other sisters and three brothers, and we are the luckiest kids ever.”
