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Illustration by Christine Wei
The bagel ornament made its first appearance on our Christmas tree the year Mike and I married.
I was pretty pleased with myself when I ran across it in a display at the now long-gone Simpson’s department store in downtown Toronto. Amid a series of trees decorated by theme, one tree was completely decked out in little bread ornaments. There, amid the baguettes and croissants, was a lone bagel. I snatched it up, knowing it was a perfect gift for my Jewish husband, who was about to celebrate his first Christmas.
Mike and I were married in the early 1980s, when people still felt free to comment on what was then called a mixed marriage. While our families were supportive, we heard it all from just about everybody else – on both sides. I was called “Abie’s Irish Rose” by the guests at our wedding and then came the more invasive, “How will you raise the kids?” A question that started the very next day. So, including a bagel on our Christmas tree struck me as a pretty perfect metaphor for how we planned to roll, if you’ll excuse the pun.
The bagel was tossed into Mike’s stocking that first Christmas, right next to some Hannukah gelt, and it was easily the best thing he received that year – or perhaps any year that followed. As he munched on his mixed nuts, he set aside the latest Robert Ludlum paperback and let the ornament dangle from his pointer finger, laughing goofily at the novelty.
(For a man who grew to love Christmas more than just about anybody, stockings remained a mystery to Mike. Early on, he asked me about the custom, and I explained they contained little treats – “you know… the stuff you’d find at the drug store.” For decades to follow, my stocking would include a pack of Bic disposable razors. From the drug store. Pink, but still hard not to take too personally.)
In the early years, it was natural for Mike to hang his special ornament himself. When our kids came along, however, and tree decorating became a chaotic free-for-all, there was always a moment when someone unearthed the bagel ornament and it would be handed over to their dad. It was a sacred ritual, with our Catholic kids recognizing their dad for who he was – and for who their parents were as a couple.
Eventually, the bagel began to show its age, developing a crack in its flimsy plastic shell. Our response was to treat it with greater care. This one was irreplaceable.
When we would take the tree down at the end of the season, I began putting the ornament in my china cabinet knowing it would be safe from dust and damage.
Mike died just days before the pandemic started. That Christmas, I discovered that I couldn’t find the bagel, and my heart broke all over again.
I searched all the usual spots but it just didn’t turn up. I was furious with myself and agonized about telling my kids that the year they lost their dad I managed to lose a key symbol associated with him.
The kids, of course, were sweet about it and that made me feel less awful about the loss.
From time to time I would spend five minutes here or there ripping the house apart hunting for it. As so often happens, the missing item turned up when I wasn’t looking for it. It was tucked away at the back of the drawer where I keep things like the kids’ hospital bracelets from their deliveries, and notes from my mother. Clearly, in the fog of grief, I must have thought that, while I’d lost Michael, I was not going to lose this cherished symbol of our lives together.
Our Christmases are different now. Rather than a family effort carrying a tree home, my youngest and I go off to the local fancy nursery where I pay through the nose for a perfect tree delivered by rent-a-husbands who set it up for us.
Ever mindful of our loss, our ornaments now include a dreidel and a menorah, co-opted from another purpose – a Hannukah bush, perhaps? – to brighten our tree. The kids even commissioned a porcelain Star of David ornament for me which features a little boy wearing a yarmulke with his arm around a little girl – a shiksa, we like to think.
But, as always, high up the tree rests the bagel, once lost and now found. In recent years, the honour of placing the bagel on our tree has fallen to our youngest daughter, who was at her father’s side his entire illness.
Our bagel is now watched more closely than ever. When it’s not on the tree, it rests on top of the chest holding Mike’s ashes. We always were an unorthodox family, and, while it might seem like a flip gesture, it is anything but. Like Proust’s madeleines or Citizen Kane’s Rosebud, this $2 ornament brings forth nothing but the happiest memories of a man well-loved and dearly missed – especially at Christmas. For us, nothing could be more sacred.
Catherine Mulroney lives in Toronto.
