Toronto man proposes with giant letters in the snow but it nearly didn't go to plan

A Toronto man proposed to his girlfriend in the biggest way he could with giant red letters visible from 50 storeys up but it nearly didn’t go to plan.

Toronto resident Jonathan Travaglio tells blogTO he had the idea to propose by writing huge letters snow a few months ago. He wanted to do something special but with lockdowns still happening, options were limited.

"You can't really go to places you can't really fly somewhere else, even when restaurants are closed," he says.

So on Sunday, Travaglio and his girlfriend Zara Bagramian went out while his brother and brother-in-law set to work writing the huge letters in the snow in an illuminated soccer field at Canoe Landing Park. It took over an hour to write the words "Marry Me."

"My brother-in-law does a lot of construction work," Travaglio says. "So he's really very diligent when it came to measuring out the letters and making sure everything was even."

But a spelling error was noticed from people in the buildings surrounding the park — instead of Marry, Travaglio’s brother wrote Merry. Eventually, someone went down to the field and told him.

"That made his heart sink, he spent the next 30 minutes or so scraping out the snow to replace it," he says.

The letters were painted with a construction-type red paint.

Fortunately, the letter was fixed in time and Travaglio and Bagramian returned home to their place on the 50^th floor to see the giant question etched in the snow.

At first, Bagramian thought Travaglio was joking around when she saw him get down on one knee because that is something he would do.

"She was like, instinctively was like,'yeah, okay' but as she turned around, she saw the [ring] box," he says.

Then she realized the proposal was for her and at first she was in shock. The shock quickly turned to happiness as she loved the huge gesture, he says.

The giant letters also caught the attention of several residents in the buildings that surround the park. One posted in the CityPlace Toronto Facebook group and many wondered if the person said yes.

"There was just like a ton of speculation about what was happening," says Travaglio. Some people even wondered if she had said no.

"I didn't respond back to the thread when I was reading these because I was just enjoying the speculation," he says. "I didn't respond until the next day."

But Bagramian said yes, and the post was flooded with congratulations.

"There's a happy ending," he says.