As recently as this summer, ALL MY CHILDREN's Alicia Minshew (Kendall) told Weekly that she and boyfriend (now fiancé) Richie Herschenfeld would get engaged when the time was right. Looks like the right time was December!

"Richie and I have been talking about getting married sometime in 2008, and I figured maybe sometime in 2008 he'd propose to me. He completely surprised me by doing on December 13," she laughs.

After a long day of work, Minshew returned to the apartment she shared with Herschenfeld. "Richie said, ‘Lish, I cooked you dinner,' and I was like, ‘Awesome!' He poured some wine, and I was like ‘Wow, wine, in the middle of the week?' He never does that."

Settling down to her meal, Minshew wondered what her boyfriend was up to. "We sat by the Christmas tree, drank some wine, and the next thing I know we're cleaning up after dinner, and he says, ‘Lish, can you go check the Christmas tree to see if it has enough water?'"

Minshew confirmed that the tree indeed had plenty of water, but then Herschenfeld pointed out something on the tree: "There was a big red bow that was not there two seconds [before]. Apparently when I was leaning over to check the water he stuck it to the tree. I looked closely and dangling from the bow was this silver Tiffany's charm bracelet and I thought, ‘All right! An early Christmas present! Nice!'"

But then Minshew noticed the inscription on the charm. "It said, ‘I love you,' on one side, and I thought, ‘Oh, that's sweet,' and then I turned it on to the other side, and it said, ‘Will you marry me, my sweet Lish.' I swear to God my whole entire body went numb. He said, ‘I've waited my whole life for you. Will you be my wife?' I combusted into tears."

Everyone knows what comes next, right? "Then I looked at his hands, thinking he'd have a ring, and he said, ‘I know what you're looking for.' He went to the kitchen and opened the cabinet where he keeps all the pots and pans and pulled [out] a ring. He said, ‘I know you would've never found it in here, since you don't cook.' [The ring is] so beautiful. It doesn't look like any ring I've ever seen. He designed it himself, just going by the kind of person I am and what he thought I would like."

"We called our parents and our families and we woke everyone up because it was late — it was like 11 o'clock at night," she gushes. "I love it because it was so unexpected. We weren't dressed up or out to dinner. It was phenomenal."