By Kelly Morgan,Staff Writer
A Secret Santa’ mission turns into a 13-year marriage for Dan and Angie Cunliffe

MINOT – She’d never been quite so bold, but there was something about this guy she kept seeing around town, and she’d learned from friends he satisfied her most important criterion: He was good to his mother.

So she ordered four roses from a local florist and sent them with a note to his business.

It read: “A rose for each week before we meet. Your Secret Santa.” That was sometime around Thanksgiving 1989.

He didn’t know what to think when he received the flowers. At first, he wondered whether his friends were playing a joke. Then he worried his admirer would be really unattractive.

But some of the women at work were impressed with the gesture, and helped sway him toward a more optimistic curiosity.

“Oh, wouldn’t it be romantic if you got married,” they told him.

And that is exactly what happened.

Dan and Angie Cunliffe, 39 and 37, respectively, have been married 13 years and share four children.

“There was just almost a kind of love-at-first-sight kind of thing,” Dan Cunliffe said, sitting next to his wife in their Verrill Road living room, talking about the first time he saw her in person.

By the time they met he knew who she was because he’d done a bit of sleuthing. When she called him on the phone one night around Christmas, still identifying herself only a “secret Santa,” he’d questioned her until he learned they had siblings who were in the same class at Edward Little High School.

From there, he got hold of a few yearbooks and pored through the pictures, making lists of the girls in his brother’s class who had sisters. He eventually found her with a few more clues.

“My secret Santa’s a babe,” he said to himself, and when she said in a phone conversation she needed a ride to the Maine Mall, he volunteered to drive.

They spent the day together, Angie Cunliffe said. At the end of it all, “I remember I got out of the car and I said (to my sister), I said, I’m gonna marry him.'”

She admits chasing him was unusual, but she’s glad she did.

“I wasn’t looking for a boyfriend; I was looking for the whole package,” she said. “Do you pass on a whole package or do you pursue it?”

Dan Cunliffe said he often prayed for the right woman to come along. “I really think I was praying a lot about it, and when I met her, I was like, This is exactly what I was praying for.'”

“If I had a checklist to go by, when I met her she completed the checklist,” he said.