It was November 1997, and Dina Honour was hosting Thanksgiving for the first time. Then 27 years old, she had invited a group of New York friends who, like her, had decided to stay in the city for the holidays.
For Dina, it had been a tough year. She was struggling with depression after a relationship fell apart.
"I was slowly getting back to normal, and I wasn't looking for love," Dina says today.
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Instead, Dina focused on hosting her friends for the holiday. She set up the dining table in the two-bedroom apartment she shared with a roommate in Brooklyn. Her sister came down from Boston. She spent the whole morning bustling around, whipping up mashed potatoes and roasting a turkey.
She asked every guest to bring something to the table. Soon her friends started arriving, carrying festive treats, cornbread, pies and cranberry sauce.
Then Dina opened the door to one of her friends and found that he had brought two strangers along with him.
This was not the kind of party where unexpected guests were welcome.
"I wasn't happy," Dina recalls. "But then I looked at him. And I said, 'Okay.'"
"He" was Richard Steggall, a 25-year-old Brit who was visiting New York for the first time. He had come to the US with a good friend whose brother lived in New York. That brother was a friend of Dina's and had been invited to her party.
"I didn't know what Thanksgiving was at the time, honestly, I had no idea," Richard says today. "Growing up in Britain, I had a vague sense of it, but I had no idea how significant the holiday was."
Richard and his friends spent the trip soaking up New York, hitting the clubs in the evenings and exploring the sights during the day.
On the morning of November 27, they woke up late after the night before. They were looking for somewhere to grab a bite.
The American in their group explained that it was a national holiday and that most restaurants would be closed.
"But I know about a party where they might have food," he said.
"That's how he pitched it to us," Richard recalls. "We had no idea it would be a semi-formal Thanksgiving dinner, very much like Christmas in Britain."
Richard got his first hint that showing up uninvited was awkward when he saw the look on Dina's face as she opened the apartment door.
But he was instantly captivated.
"From the very start, I was captivated by Dina," he says today.
The feeling was mutual. Dina's annoyance at the unexpected guests quickly turned into an instant attraction to Richard.
"I thought he was very, very good-looking," she says. "You can't make this stuff up, right? A tall, dark-haired stranger showing up at your door on Thanksgiving."
She led the uninvited guests into the apartment. Richard and his British buddy, feeling awkward, tried to keep as low a profile as possible.
"The other uninvited guest and I sort of hid in the corner, trying to stay out of the way," Richard says.
From his spot in the corner, Richard watched Dina work the room.
"I thought she was gorgeous. To me, coming from London, she was this New York woman," he says. "She was strong, confident, a little bit loud, but funny, just radiating life. And I was captivated from the very beginning."
Richard asked a few guests about Dina, but he didn't talk to her directly, he didn't want to bother the host he had already offended by turning up unannounced.
Bonding Over Pumpkin Pie
When it was time for dessert, Dina came over to Richard with a slice of pumpkin pie and whipped cream, the quintessential Thanksgiving dessert, which is virtually unheard of in Britain.
Richard had never tried it before and eagerly accepted.
They started talking. Dina, who loves literature, mentioned Shakespeare's Ophelia in conversation. Richard caught the reference, he knew "Hamlet," he said.
"It was like a little light switching on," Dina says. "Not many guys you meet at a party, somewhere between the beer and the pumpkin pie, are going to be happy to chat about 'Hamlet.'"
They spent the rest of the evening talking, quickly forging a connection.
"I think we had so much in common in our outlook on life, and in the things that mattered to us as people, and in the way we saw the world, and in what we wanted out of life," Richard says.
After dinner, the group headed to a bar. There, Dina and Richard were so focused on each other that Dina recalls her sister, who had traveled all the way from Boston for the visit, being a little annoyed.
"We sat at the bar on bar stools facing each other and sort of ignored everyone else," she says. "We spent the whole night talking, the whole next day."
On Friday afternoon, Richard was due to fly back to London.
Dina walked him to the subway station, and they said goodbye on the platform.
As the train doors closed, Dina recalls a feeling of certainty.
"It was something intuitive and instinctive," she says now.
Back at her apartment, Dina confided in her sister:
"That's the man I'm going to marry."
Falling in Love Over the Phone
When he came to New York, Richard was seeing someone in London. The first thing he did when he got back to Britain was end that relationship.
"I didn't quite know what was going to happen," he says, "But I felt it was the right decision."
The next day, Dina called him from New York.
And so began a month of daily long-distance phone calls and the occasional letter sent across the Atlantic.
"We had a kind of old-fashioned courtship over the phone," Dina says.
She was working as a substitute teacher at the time and would call Richard from the school break room.
Richard was working as a flower and Christmas tree seller in Chelsea, London, sometimes DJing in the evenings. He would talk to Dina when he got back after a long workday or before heading out to a club.
It was mid-December when Richard suggested it.
"Listen," he said. "Why don't you come to London for Christmas?"
"I don't know. This is serious. It's Christmas. I didn't spend Thanksgiving with my family. I should spend Christmas with them," Dina recalls thinking.
She was also hesitant to risk her heart. She'd had a hard breakup earlier that year and had only recently returned to a place of contentment.
But a thought kept nagging at her that she should seize the moment.
"I don't want to regret not doing it," she recalls thinking. "If this is a chance, I don't want to lose it."
One cold December day, Dina went to a travel agency and walked out holding a plane ticket to London.
"It was a commitment, a tangible thing," she says. "I think I was ready to take the risk, hoping everything would go well, but also knowing that if it didn't, it wouldn't be the end of my world."
Dina says the feeling that everything would be fine, no matter what happened, came from a sense of self-worth that she had worked hard to cultivate after her difficult year. She was confident in her connection with Richard, but she was also confident in herself.
Her friends and family were "cautiously optimistic," she says. They supported her decision and hoped her faith in Richard would prove well-founded.
A Christmas Reunion
Dina flew from New York to London for Christmas. In the arrivals area of Heathrow Airport, Richard was waiting for her. It was 9 p.m., and he was holding a bouquet of his flowers from Chelsea.
Richard had told his friends and family that he'd met someone during his trip to New York. But he hadn't had much time to share details about this budding relationship.
"It all happened so fast between November and December, and with the flower and Christmas tree selling job, all of late November and all of December, it's intense, it's like 20-hour days."
In Britain, December 26 is known as Boxing Day and is also a national holiday. On the morning of Boxing Day, Richard and Dina set off together for his parents' house.
"In our family, there's a tradition of putting on a sort of champagne brunch with smoked salmon, so the whole family is sitting around the table, drinking champagne, and in walk Dina and I," Richard recalls.
He introduced Dina to his family, then briefly excused himself. When he came back, Dina "was the center of attention," drinking and chatting with his family.
"I left her in the room with my mum and dad, and my aunt and uncle, and my sister, and they were all getting along wonderfully," Richard says.
"They were all incredibly lovely," Dina says.
"My parents were so happy that I'd met someone, and it was clearly love at first sight, and I think they'll tell you they could completely see the change in me and see how happy I was," Richard says.
Later that day, Richard surprised Dina with a plane ticket. They were going to fly to the island of Mallorca in Spain with some of Richard's friends for New Year's.
It was a wonderful trip, Dina says, even if she had to deal with some curious questioning from her new boyfriend's friends.
When the holiday period ended, she had to return to the US. But Richard booked a spontaneous weekend in New York in late January 1998, and Dina flew to London for Valentine's Day.
For that holiday, the couple rented a sports car and stayed at a fancy hotel in Richmond, west London.
"It was all outside our comfort zone at the time, but we were trying to recreate this romantic weekend," Richard says.
He bought a suit and a pair of smart shoes for the first time and recalls almost falling down the stairs at the hotel because the shoes weren't properly broken in.
Moving to New York
Then, in the spring of 1998, Richard finished up his work at the flower market and headed to New York for three months, planning to spend the summer with Dina.
It wasn't meant to be permanent, but looking back, he thinks his friends and family knew better.
"The goodbyes we had, and some of the parties that were organized, had a more final feel than just a three-month thing, they really were a send-off into a new life."
Even so, Richard arrived with just a green gym bag of clothes. He moved into Dina's apartment, the very same one he had shown up at uninvited the previous Thanksgiving.
They spent the hot summer days together, exploring the city, walking through Central Park and the East Village, strengthening their conviction that they wanted to be together long-term.
Although they felt marriage might be in their future, the couple didn't want to get married at that moment, even if it might have been a way to secure Richard the chance to stay in the US.
"I think we were both very clear that 'Yes, we want you to stay, and we'll find a way to make it happen, and yes, maybe marriage will come later.' But those two things were very separate, I think, for both of us," Dina says.
So Richard started looking for a job that would provide a visa, and eventually landed a position at the United Nations.
"When you tell people the story and they can't believe it's true, they think you're some kind of spy working for the UN or something," Richard jokes.
It was an amazing career opportunity. Richard and Dina began settling into life together in New York.
A New Year's Eve Proposal
The couple's story began on Thanksgiving and continued at Christmas. And on New Year's Eve 1999, they started a new chapter together when Richard proposed on the threshold of the new millennium.
The couple recall watching the fireworks over Sydney Harbour on TV that morning. Dina was marveling at the show, but Richard was quiet with nerves.
"I sat there, really nervous and gloomy. And Dina's like, 'What's wrong with you, it's New Year's Eve and it's the millennium?'" Richard says, laughing.
That evening, they headed to a friend's party in a high-rise apartment overlooking the city. By this point, Richard's nerves were even worse.
"I was having a hard time holding it together, I started telling people," he says. "I shared it with a couple of people who were so excited."
More friends found out when Richard couldn't open a bottle of champagne because his hands were shaking so badly.
He handed it off to someone else and pushed his way through the crowd to find Dina. When the clock struck midnight, he proposed.
"I think I accidentally kicked him in the shin out of excitement," she says.
The couple married in April 2001 in New York, at a place called the Manhattan Penthouse on Fifth Avenue. Their British friends and family stayed in glamorous hotels around Union Square.
"We wanted to give our friends and family who were coming, especially from London, but also from where I grew up, near Boston, a real New York experience, so we chose a top-floor venue, windows on all sides," Dina says.
Guests admired the views of the Empire State Building as they raised a toast to the couple's future.
Afterward, Dina and Richard hired limousines to send the guests on their way. Some headed to bars around Union Square or enjoyed a nightcap at their hotels.
"There are all sorts of stories about where people ended up," Richard says. "My father was last seen in a limousine, I'm not sure if it's real, but it's become real, standing up through the sunroof, pointing uptown as the limo drove up Broadway. I think it's probably an urban myth, but it's become part of our family legend."
A New Chapter in Europe
After an "amazing" honeymoon in Australia, Richard and Dina continued to enjoy life in New York, later welcoming two sons.
And in 2008, their lives took a new turn when the family moved to Nicosia, Cyprus, for Richard's job with the UN.
When the opportunity to move came up, the couple had started to feel they'd outgrown their New York apartment. Richard, who always had a case of wanderlust, was itching for a new adventure.
Even so, the decision to move to Cyprus wasn't easy. Their younger son was just six months old at the time. On top of that, Dina says she's the more cautious of the two, and she wasn't sure at first. But after a long conversation, the couple decided to take the risk.
"We decided the pros outweighed the cons," Dina says.
In Nicosia, the couple felt some culture shock at first, but eventually made good friends, embracing the Mediterranean way of life, delighting that their children were growing up amid beautiful scenery and sunshine.
"I think it really changed our thinking about the kind of life we could have," Richard says.
So much so that instead of moving back to New York, as they'd always assumed, the family later relocated to Copenhagen.
Fast forward to 2023, and Dina and Richard now live in Berlin. Their children are 19 and 15, and they may be New Yorkers by birth, but they've grown up all over Europe and love to travel. Their older son is currently at college in Britain.
Richard still works for the UN, and Dina is an author and editor. She wrote the book "There's No Place Like Home: Lessons Learned From a Decade Abroad" in 2018. More recently, she published a new memoir, "That's a Lot to Unpack," in November 2023.
Thanksgiving Traditions
It's been more than 10 years since Richard and Dina last lived in the US, but Thanksgiving remains an important date for the couple, after all, it's the holiday that brought them together.
"The kids know the story, it's become part of our family folklore," Dina says.
"It's always a date on the calendar when we start reflecting on our life and on what happened, and on everything, the whole story from beginning to end," Richard says.
Richard adds that in the first few years of life in the US, Thanksgiving quickly became his favorite American holiday.
"It was magical, because you'd come over and you'd have this fantastic food, you'd spend time with family, and the next day you'd just sit around in sweatpants watching TV, everyone relaxing together," he recalls.
When Richard and Dina first moved to Cyprus, they tried to recreate traditional American Thanksgiving customs. But as they settled into Europe, they began to mark the holiday, which is an ordinary workday in Europe, differently.
They started a tradition of going out to dinner as a whole family to reflect on what they're grateful for. This year the dynamic will be different, since their older son will be in Britain at college, but Dina and Richard still plan to celebrate.
"We'll go to dinner with our younger son and raise a toast to the happiness of the older one, whom we've successfully launched into the world," Dina says.
"As always, we have a lot to be grateful for, but we're always grateful that we have each other, even if there's no pumpkin pie."
Richard and Dina say they'll also be forever grateful for their original chance encounter, their instant connection and their conversations in the past, present and future.
"We still spend hours and hours and hours talking," Dina says.
"Dina, who offered me that pumpkin pie, was the beginning of that conversation, which has been going on for 26 years now," Richard says.
