(CNN) -- It was November 1997 and Dina Honor was hosting a Thanksgiving dinner for the first time. The then 27-year-old had invited a group of New York friends who, like her, had decided to stay in the city for the holidays. It had been a difficult year for Honor: she had suffered from depression after a bad relationship.
"Little by little I had regained a sense of normality and was not looking for love," Honor tells CNN Travel today.
Instead, Honor was focused on hosting her friends for the holidays. She had set up the dining room table in the two-bedroom apartment she shared in Brooklyn. His sister had traveled from Boston. He spent the whole morning making mashed potatoes and roasting the turkey.
He had asked each guest to bring something to contribute to the meal. Soon her friends began to arrive, bearing festive good news, cornbread, pies, and cranberry sauce.
Then Honor opened the door for a friend, only to realize that she had arrived with two mystery guests.
It wasn't the kind of gathering where surprise escorts are welcome.
"I wasn't happy," recalls Honor. "But then I saw it and I was like, 'Okay.'"
"He" was Richard Steggall, a 25-year-old Briton vacationing in New York for the first time. He had traveled to the United States with a good friend who had a brother who lived in New York. This brother was a friend of Honor and had been invited to her party.
"At the time I didn't know what Thanksgiving was, to be honest, I had no idea," Steggall says today. "Growing up in the UK, I was vaguely aware, but had absolutely no idea of the significance of the party."
Steggall and his friends had spent their vacation soaking up New York, partying at night and exploring the sights by day.
On the morning of November 27, they had woken up late, having gone out the night before. They were looking for a place to eat.
The American in the group explained that it was a national holiday and most restaurants would be closed.
"But I know of a party where there might be food," he said.
"That's how he pitched it to us," Steggall recalls. "We had no idea it was going to be a semi-formal Thanksgiving dinner, much like Christmas in the UK."
Steggall got his first inkling that showing up uninvited was a blunder when he saw Honor's expression as she opened the door.
But he was also instantly captivated.
"From the beginning, Dina captivated me," she says today.
The feeling was mutual. Honor's frustration over unexpected guests was quickly tempered by her instant attraction to Steggall.
"I thought he was very, very handsome," she says. "He seems made up, right? The tall, dark stranger who shows up at your door on Thanksgiving."
She led the 'colados' to the apartment. Steggall and his British partner, feeling uncomfortable, tried to be as discreet as possible.
"The other guest and I hid in a corner so we wouldn't be noticed," says Steggall.
From his place in the corner, Steggall watched Honor circling the room.
"I thought she was beautiful. To me, coming from London, it was a New York woman," she says. "She was strong, self-assured, a little loud, but fun...she just exuded life. And she had a crush on me from the start."
Steggall asked some of the guests about Honor, but didn't speak to her directly—he didn't want to upset the hostess he'd already offended by arriving uninvited.
Meeting over pumpkin pie
At dessert time, Honor approached Steggall with a slice of pumpkin pie with whipped cream, a quintessential Thanksgiving dessert that's not commonplace in the United Kingdom.
Steggall had never tried it before and gladly agreed.
The two started talking. Honor, who loves literature, dropped a reference to Shakespeare's Ophelia into the conversation. Steggall got it: he knew "Hamlet," he said.
"It was like a little light went on," says Honor. "There aren't many guys you meet at a party, over beer and pumpkin pie, who are happy to have a conversation about 'Hamlet.'"
The two spent the rest of the night talking, quickly bonding.
"I think we had a lot in common in terms of our vision of life, and the things that were important to us as people and human beings, and the way we see the world, and the things we want out of life." says Steggall.
When they finished dinner, the group went to a bar. There, Honor and Steggall were so focused on each other that Honor remembers his sister, who had traveled from Boston for the meeting, being a little upset.
"We sit at the bar, on stools facing each other, ignoring everyone else," he says. "We spent the whole night talking and the whole of the next day."
On Friday afternoon Steggall had to fly back to London.
Honour walked him to the subway station and they said goodbye on the platform.
As the train doors closed, Honor recalls feeling a sense of certainty.
"It was really intuitive and instinctive," he says now.
Back at her apartment, Honor confided to her sister, "That's the man I'm going to marry."
Falling in love over the phone
They said their connection was almost instantaneous. Courtesy of Dina Honor
When she traveled to New York, Steggall had been seeing someone in London. The first thing he did upon landing in the UK was break up.
"I didn't quite know what was going to happen," he says, "but I felt like it was the right thing to do."
The next day, Honor called him from New York.
And so began a month of daily long-distance telephone conversations, and the occasional letter sent across the Atlantic.
"We had a kind of old-fashioned courtship on the phone," says Honor.
She was working as a substitute teacher at the time, calling Steggall from the break room at school.
Steggall worked as a flower and Christmas tree vendor in Chelsea, London, occasionally DJing at night. He would talk to Honor when he came back from a long day at work or before going out to a club.
It was mid-December when Steggall proposed.
"Listen," Steggall said. "Why don't you come to London for Christmas?" "I don't know. It's a lot. It's Christmas. I didn't spend Thanksgiving with my family. I should spend Christmas with them," Honor remembers thinking.
She was also hesitant to put her heart on the line. She'd had that difficult breakup earlier in the year and she'd just felt fulfilled again.
But the thought was on his mind that he should take advantage of this moment.
"I don't want to regret not doing this," he remembers thinking. "If this is the opportunity, I don't want to lose it."
One cold December day, she went to a travel agency and came out with a plane ticket to London in her hands.
"It was a commitment, something tangible," he says. "I think I was willing to take a chance, hoping it would work out, but also knowing that if I didn't, it wasn't going to be the end of my world."
Honour says that feeling that she would be okay no matter what came from a sense of self that she had worked to cultivate after a rough year. She trusted the connection to Steggall, but also herself.
Her friends and family were "cautiously optimistic," she says. They supported his decision and hoped that his faith in Steggall was well founded.
A Christmas Reunion
Honor flew from New York to London on Christmas Day. Stegall was waiting for her in arrivals at Heathrow airport. It was 9pm and she was carrying a bouquet of her Chelsea flowers.
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Steggall had told his friends and family that he had met someone while on vacation in New York. But he hadn't had much time to share many details about this blossoming connection.
"Everything happened so fast between November and December... and with the work selling flowers and Christmas trees, the whole end of November and the whole month of December is full, it's like 20-hour days ".
In the UK, December 26 is known as Boxing Day and is also a national holiday. In the morning of
“Boxing Day,” Steggall and Honor traveled to her parents' house together.
"It's a tradition in our family to have some sort of champagne and smoked salmon brunch, so the whole family was sitting around the table having a glass of champagne and Dina and I walked in," recalls Steggall.
He introduced her to his family, then excused himself momentarily. When she returned, Honor was "the center of attention," drinking and chatting with her family.
"I left her in the room with my parents, my uncles and my sister, and they got along very well," says Steggall.
"They were all incredibly nice," says Honor.
"My parents were very happy that I had met someone, and it was clear that it was love from the beginning... and I think they will tell you that they could see a complete change in me, and see how happy I was," Steggall says.
That same day, Steggall surprised Honor with a plane ticket. The two were going to fly to the island of Majorca in
Spain with some friends from Steggall for New Year's Eve.
It was a great trip, says Honor, although she did have to put up with a bit of snooping from her new boyfriend's friends.
When the holidays were over, he had to return to the United States. But Steggall booked a spontaneous weekend in New York at the end of January 1998, while Honor flew to London for Valentine's Day.
For the holiday, the couple rented a sports car and stayed at a fancy hotel in Richmond, West London.
"This was all out of our comfort zone at the time, but we tried to recreate this romantic weekend," says Steggall.
He bought himself a suit and a fancy pair of shoes for the first time, and remembers nearly falling down the hotel stairs because the shoes weren't on right.
Move to New York
In the spring of 1998, Steggall quit her job at the flower market and traveled to New York for three months, intending to spend the summer with Honor.
It wasn't supposed to be permanent, but looking back, he thinks his friends and family knew better.
"The farewells we had, and some of the parties that were organized, had a more definitive air than a three-month thing: it was really a farewell to a new life."
Still, Steggall arrived with just a green bag of clothes. He moved into Honor's apartment, the same one he'd shown up at, uninvited, the previous Thanksgiving.
They spent the hot summer days together, exploring the city, strolling through Central Park and the East Village, cementing their certainty that they wanted to be together for the long haul.
Although they felt marriage might be in their future, the couple say they didn't want to get married at the time, even though it would have been a way to ensure Steggall could stay in the United States.
"I think it was very clear to both of us that, 'Yes, we want you to say it, and we'll find a way to do it, and yes, maybe down the road, there will be marriage.' But those two things were very separate, I think for both," says Honor.
So Steggall started looking for visa jobs and ended up working at the United Nations.
"When you tell people the story, they can't believe it's true: they think you're a spy working for the UN or something," Steggall quips.
It was an incredible opportunity in terms of his career. Steggall and Honor began to settle together in New York.
A New Year's Eve Proposal
The proposal of the millennium: The couple got engaged at a New Year's Eve party on December 31, 1999. This photo was taken just after Steggall proposed to her when the clock said midnight. Honor said yes. Courtesy of Dina Honor
The couple's story had begun at Thanksgiving and continued into Christmas. And on New Year's Eve 1999, the two began a new chapter together when Steggall proposed at the turn of the millennium.
The couple remember watching the fireworks explode over Sydney Harbor that morning on CNN. Honor was in awe of the spectacle, but Steggall had been quiet in his nerves.
"I was sitting there, very nervous and in a bad mood. And Dina was like, 'What's wrong with you, it's New Year's Eve and it's the new millennium?'" Steggall says, laughing.
That night, they headed to a friend's party in a skyscraper overlooking the city. By this time, Steggall's nerves were even worse.
"I was having a little trouble keeping my cool, I had started to tell people," she says. "I shared it with a couple of people, who were very excited."
More friends found out when Steggall couldn't open a bottle of champagne because his hands were shaking too much.
She handed it to someone else and pushed through the crowd to find Honor. When the clock struck midnight, she asked him to marry him.
"I think I kicked his shin in excitement," she says.
The couple married in April 2001 in New York at a place called the Manhattan Penthouse on Fifth Avenue. His British friends and family stayed in the glamorous hotels that ring Union Square.
"We wanted to give our friends and family who came, especially from London, but also from where I grew up, near Boston, a real New York experience, so we chose a place on the top floor, with windows on all sides "Honour says.
Guests admired the views of the Empire State Building as they toasted to the future of the couple.
Afterwards, Honor and Steggall arranged for limousines to carry the guests on their way. Some went to Union Square bars or enjoyed drinks at their hotels.
"There are all kinds of stories about where people ended up," says Steggall. "My father was last seen in a limo, I'm not sure if this is real, but he's become a real thing, going out the sunroof, pointing towards the city, as the limo went up Broadway. I think it's probably an urban myth, but it has become part of our family legend.
A new chapter in Europe
After an "incredible" honeymoon in Australia, Steggall and Honor continued to enjoy life in New York, later having two children.
And in 2008, his life took a new turn when the family moved to Nicosia, Cyprus, for Steggall's work at the UN.
When the opportunity to relocate arose, the couple began to feel that their New York apartment had become too small for them. Steggall, who has always been a bit of a traveler, was looking forward to a new adventure.
However, the decision to move to Cyprus was not an easy one. His youngest child was only six months old at the time.
Also, Honor says she's the more risk-averse of the two, and she wasn't sure at first. But, after a long conversation, the couple decided to do it.
"We decided the pros outweighed the cons," says Honor.
In Nicosia, the couple had to deal with a bit of culture shock at first, but eventually made good friends, embracing the Mediterranean lifestyle, content that their children grew up in beautiful scenery and sunshine.
"I think it changed our mindset a lot about what kind of life we could have," says Steggall.
So much so that, instead of returning to New York as they had always assumed, the family later moved to Copenhagen.
In 2021, Steggall and Honor continue to live in Denmark. Their children are 17 and 13, and they may be New Yorkers by birth, but they grew up all over Europe and love to travel.
Steggall continues to work for the UN, while Honor is an author and editor. She has published the book "there's Some Place Like Home: Lessons From a Decade Abroad" in 2018.
Thanksgiving Traditions
It's been more than 10 years since Steggall and Honor last lived in the US, but Thanksgiving remains a significant date for the couple; after all, the party brought them together.
"The kids know the story, it's become part of our family tradition," says Honor.
"It's always a date on the calendar where we start to reflect on our lives and what's happened and everything, the whole story from start to finish," says Steggall.
Steggall adds that during his early life in the United States, Thanksgiving quickly became his favorite American holiday.
"It was magical because you would go and have this fantastic meal, spend time with family, and the next day you would sit in a comfortable romper and watch TV, all together relaxing," she recalls.
When Steggall and Honor first moved to Cyprus, they tried to recreate American Thanksgiving traditions. But as they have adjusted to life in Europe, they have begun to celebrate the holiday in a different way.
This year in Copenhagen, they went out to dinner as a family and reflected on what they are thankful for.
And one thing Steggall and Honor will be forever grateful for is their chance meeting, their connection, and their years of conversations.
"We still spend hours and hours and hours talking," says Honor.
"Dina offering me that pumpkin pie was the start of that conversation, which has been going on for 24 years now," says Steggall.
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