This One Time I Was Accidentally A Hero At Christmas

A toboggan, a love story, and Beverly D'Angelo calling my cell phone.

Byron Lane

Dec 24, 2025

∙ Paid

CONFESSION

I was not lovable. I had evidence.

I was open-veined on all the dating sites: OkCupid, Match, Jdate—and I’m not even Jewish.

No boyfriend. No traction. No momentum. Nothing could quiet that voice.

Whitney Houston once sang, I’d rather be alone than unhappy. Eventually, I accepted both.

Then, Steven. We were an 80% match on OkCupid. Doesn’t science matter? We met for coffee. He touched my arm.

Steven. Ridiculous name for an incredible guy—handsome, brilliant, playful. And somehow interested in me? I was skeptical.

We kept seeing each other. This birthed a new anxiety—how fast could I screw it up?

The Christmas Test.

Steven and I had been dating for a few months. Christmas was approaching. I figured, sink or swim. I agreed to go home with him to Maine to meet his family.

It was me testing him. It was him testing me.

A first meeting of family is worse than a first date. Family is where you find out whether you really belong. Family doesn’t hide the truth.

We booked a flight. Instant regret.

Win them over. Or die.

Watching Steven with his nieces and nephews, I fell harder in love with him. And my insecurity kept splitting me open.

Then, another question. Was his family testing me?

I was originally from Louisiana but got the hell out of there as fast as I could. I was fully Los Angeles by now. All city. All sunshine. No snow shoes. No winter coat.

I told his mother the snow was beautiful. “Try shoveling it,” she replied. Steven’s sister wanted me to mount something called a “toboggan.” His brother asked if I had any tips for “deep frying a turkey.”

I wanted to fit in. These were good people—even despite what was happening to that poor turkey.

This was a Rom-Com kind of family. A Hallmark Channel kind of family. They always had Christmas movies playing, like Prep and Landing or Die Hard or Christmas Vacation.

On Christmas Eve, they asked me if I liked lobster. As I was explaining vegetarianism to blank faces, my cell phone rang. They were still staring at me as the caller ID displayed her name.

Beverly D’Angelo was calling my phone.

At the time, I worked for Carrie Fisher. One of the strangest parts of my job was clearing Carrie’s home voicemail. Not because of stalkers or fans, but because of her mother. Debbie Reynolds left long, rambling, affectionate messages that sometimes came with unusual housekeeping instructions and were later followed by a quiz.

Eventually, I forwarded Carrie’s home phone to my cell so I could intercept Debbie before the answering machine filled up.

Beverly had called Carrie’s home line in Beverly Hills, and it transferred to me, standing in Steven’s family’s kitchen in Maine.

I wanted to duck into the next room, shield them from my 24/7-ish job.

But, this was Christmas Eve, with Christmas Vacation blaring on the TV, and nothing could have been cooler than me having one of the film’s stars on the line.

The kitchen was quiet. The snow stopped falling. The turkey in the deep fryer stopped screaming.

I put Beverly on speakerphone. The voice, sultry, confident. She was a badass. The call was quick, easy, Beverly would try Carrie’s cell. I hung up.

I looked around. And yes—for a moment, I thought: Now they think I’m cool.

But then, dinner was served.

REVELATION

They had made lasagna for me—vegetarian, “a first-time recipe,” I was told.

“Beautiful out there,” Steven said of the snowy evening. “Try shoveling it,” his mother replied—a standard, playful retort. Not an attack on me.

And the next time I was offered a toboggan ride, I was told not everyone gets the invitation. (Very sweet, but still, absolutely not.)

The call didn’t make me cool. It made me present enough to see they had already folded me into the rhythm of their day, their family jokes, their lives.

The call didn’t create my place in the family. It decorated it.

Steven and I never stopped choosing each other after that. We married in 2021.