Colleen Bridgit DeCourcy and Jason Leonard MacDonald like to think that their Christmas Eve wedding in New York City was 40 years in the making.
The two first met in November 1983 during rehearsals for a production of “Guys and Dolls” at Western University in London, Ontario.
Ms. DeCourcy, then a freshman, was cast in the lead role of Miss Adelaide. To help fill the male parts, high schoolers were invited to audition, and Mr. MacDonald, a high school senior at the time, made it into the chorus.
“I immediately noticed Jason across the room,” Ms. DeCourcy said. “He was tall. He was cute. He was a creative person like me.”
Mr. MacDonald was also enamored: “Colleen was this very cute, preppy girl with a sly smile and confidence to spare.”
Ms. DeCourcy made the first move. “He was wearing Tretorn tennis sneakers, so I asked him if he played tennis,” she said. “The conversation just flowed from then on.”
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A few weeks later, Ms. DeCourcy asked Mr. MacDonald to walk her back to her dorm after rehearsal on a snowy night. When they reached the entrance, a playful snowball fight gave way to an embrace and a kiss. “It is still the single most romantic moment of my life,” Mr. MacDonald said.
They began an “odd courtship,” as Ms. DeCourcy described it. “I was deeply embarrassed that I was in college and that he hadn’t yet finished high school,” she said. “I didn’t want people to know we were seeing each other.”
They kept their relationship secret by hiding out in her dorm room and driving around town in his mother’s Pontiac. They were “wrapped up in each other,” Ms. DeCourcy said, and had “big, open, naïvely young hearts.”
Mr. MacDonald said that he was so “madly in love” that he kept a journal of their six months together, documenting each day: what they did, where they ate and how they were feeling. He has reread the entries repeatedly ever since. “I never did that for any other relationship,” he said.
Still, he had a strong sense that their time together wouldn’t last. “Both of us were super ambitious and knew we were getting out of the worlds we’d grown up in,” he said.
By June 1984, he had moved from London, Ontario, where he was from, to Banff, Alberta, to study theater at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. Ms. DeCourcy, who grew up in Whitby, Ontario, had dropped out of college, moved to Toronto and found work as a copywriter for an advertising agency.
Though they no longer considered themselves a couple, the two kept in touch over the next few years. They met once, chatting for about half an hour in September 1988 on a street corner in Manhattan. Mr. MacDonald had moved to New York City to study at Circle in the Square Theater School in Midtown, and she was in town from Toronto for the weekend with her boyfriend at the time.
“After that, we let it go,” she said. “Life moved on and moved quickly.”
Each got married. Ms. DeCourcy continued working in advertising and lived in London, England; Montreal; and Detroit before landing in Manhattan, where she moved into an apartment in SoHo.
Mr. MacDonald became a full-time actor and lived in Manhattan and Los Angeles before moving to Atlanta with his former wife to help care for her ailing father.
Though their lives didn’t intersect for the next 35-plus years, Mr. MacDonald said he always “held onto the memory” of her. “I never forgot her.”
In August 2024, he found himself thinking about her “more and more,” and messaged her on LinkedIn, spontaneously, writing, “Remember that kid who used to be in love with you?”
Ms. DeCourcy responded within two hours. “Of course I remembered him and was curious as to what he was like now and how his life had worked out,” she said.
They exchanged messages, sharing updates about their lives. Ms. DeCourcy’s marriage had long since ended. She has a daughter, now 31, and she mentioned that her son-in-law is from Atlanta, and she planned to visit his family that Christmas. “I told him that I would reach out when I was in town and suggested that maybe we meet for coffee,” she said.
She texted him on Dec. 23, asking if he was free the following afternoon. By then, he said, his marriage was ending, and when they locked eyes outside of the Spiller Park Coffee at the Toco Hills Shopping Center, both felt that it was “as if they had never been apart.”
“I felt a jolt,” Ms. DeCourcy said.
“My heart skipped a beat,” Mr. MacDonald said.
They talked for two hours about their careers, families and “everything else,” they said. Mr. MacDonald walked her to her car, and as they hugged goodbye, it was clear to both that their conversation was the beginning of something more. “I pulled away, overflowing with adrenaline and happiness,” Ms. DeCourcy said. “I’ve not felt that way before or since.”
Ms. DeCourcy, 60, works from New York as the chief marketing officer of Sonos, an audio company based in Santa Barbara, Calif.
Mr. MacDonald, 59, is an actor best known for playing Grayson Gilbert on “The Vampire Diaries.” He has also appeared on “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” “NCIS” and “Welcome to Flatch,” a series that ran on Fox for two seasons. He is also the career essentials program director at the Terry Knickerbocker Studio, an acting school in Brooklyn’s Industry City neighborhood. His previous marriage ended in divorce.
When they met again a month later, when both were in Los Angeles for work, their relationship took off. They began seeing each other most weekends, with Mr. MacDonald frequently visiting Ms. DeCourcy in New York. The two caught Broadway and Off Broadway shows, cooked meals together and spent time with Ms. DeCourcy’s daughter, Emma DeCourcy, and her husband, Jason Barefoot. “We were one big happy family,” Ms. DeCourcy said.
They also retreated to Ms. DeCourcy’s home in East Hampton, N.Y., where they enjoyed beach walks with her two Shar-Peis and cozy nights in, and tagged along on each other’s work trips. “We discovered early on that we traveled very well together,” Mr. MacDonald said.
When they weren’t together, they talked, texted and had FaceTime calls for hours a day. “We were quickly moving toward being together for the rest of our time,” Mr. MacDonald said.
“Life felt better with Jason than not, and it became clear that I didn’t want to spend a whole lot of time without him anymore,” she said. “We had already been apart for 42 years.”
By July, Mr. MacDonald left Atlanta and moved in with Ms. DeCourcy at her apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn, where she was living near her daughter. It remains their home.
The pair floated the idea of marrying sooner than later, and made it official on Oct. 17 during a walk with their dogs (including his chocolate Labrador) on East Hampton’s Main Beach.
“We knew that there was only one date for us,” Mr. MacDonald said of their wedding day. “Christmas Eve, a year after we re-met.”
Their wedding, before 16 guests, was held at La Mercerie, a French restaurant in SoHo that they love. Joanna Coles, a close friend of the couple and the chief creative and content officer at The Daily Beast, officiated after being ordained by the Universal Life Church for the occasion.
Ms. DeCourcy wore a two-piece cream-colored outfit: a custom-made tuxedo shirt by Emilie Hawtin, the founder of the label Clementina, paired with a custom feathered skirt by One/Of, designed by Patricia Voto. Mr. MacDonald wore a bespoke tuxedo by J. Mueser.
The couple said that their twin grandsons, Colin and Duncan DeCourcy, born on Nov. 20, were the “guests of honor.”
The newlyweds shared their first dance to “Archie, Marry Me,” by Alvvays. In her toast, Ms. DeCourcy’s daughter spoke about her mother’s love with Mr. MacDonald. “I’ve seen her find joy in the most mundane parts of life, simply because she’s doing them with Jason,” she said. “She has rediscovered old passions and found new ones.”
The evening’s playlist was filled with songs that hold personal meaning to the couple, including “What I Like About You” by The Romantics — a favorite they often danced to more than four decades ago.
On This Day
When: Dec. 24, 2025
Where: La Mercerie, New York City
Early, but Just in Time The newborn “guests of honor” weren’t originally supposed to be there — they had arrived five weeks early. Duncan was released from the neonatal intensive care unit on Dec. 18, followed by Colin on Dec. 21. Each wore an elf onesie for the event and slept through the ceremony and dinner, waking only for a feeding.
Pictures, After All A private person by nature, Ms. DeCourcy initially hoped to marry without capturing the day in photographs. Mr. MacDonald and Ms. DeCourcy’s daughter, Emma, pushed back, arguing that she would regret not having pictures of the day. There was not a single image of the couple’s teenage courtship.
Mr. MacDonald’s longtime friend, Heather Weston, an artist and photographer, agreed to document the day, despite never having shot a wedding before. Her daughter, Errolyn, helped, and together, they worked across formats, using a DSLR, a point-and-shoot camera, an iPhone and vintage Polaroid film.
The Celebration Continues: On Christmas Day, the newlyweds cooked Christmas dinner at home for their children. “When we were dating in 1983, Colleen went home for the holiday for a month and I moped around missing her the entire time — for a 17-year-old, it was a sad and lonely month,” Mr. Macdonald said. “After 42 years, we finally got the Christmas we’d been waiting for.”
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