Please join us in a quick game of holiday culinary word association: Thanksgiving: turkey. Valentine’s Day: chocolate. St. Patrick’s Day: corned beef and cabbage. Christmas: bagels.

Say WHAT?

According to sales figures from several well-known Maine bagel bakeries, bagels – “the archetypal culinary staple of our people,” as Liel Leibovitz wrote in “The Most 100 Jewish Foods” – are hugely popular at Christmastime.

“Christmas is bonkers at the bakery,” emailed Allison Reid, co-owner and head baker at Scratch Baking in South Portland, a place nationally known for its bagels. “This time of year, we usually make about 2,000 bagels on a typical weekend day. On Christmas Eve, we will probably be making 3,300.” In a later conversation, she upped that to 3,500.

Rose Foods in Portland reported that bagel sales roughly double at Christmastime. At Rover Bagel in Biddeford, sales go up by about one-third, and Easter is even bigger. Though The Purple House no longer sells bagels (and isn’t open for regular service just now), back when Mainers drove out of their way to North Yarmouth for its sought-after Montreal-style bagels, sales would go “way up” right before Christmas, said owner/baker Krista Kern Desjarlais. Ditto for Maples, at least historically, though in the bakery’s new New Gloucester home, limited oven space may change that, owner Robin Ray said in an email.

And at Mister Bagel on Forest Avenue, “Christmas Eve and Christmas Day are the two biggest days of the year,” said Joel Baker, who owns the Portland store with his wife, Jane. When her parents founded Mister Bagel in 1977, it was the first bagel store in Maine. It’s now a franchise, and the Forest Avenue location, unlike many of its competitors, is open on Christmas Day. (Unlike many bagel bakers these days, the Bakers are Jewish.)

Nationally, homemade bagels made it onto popular food blog Love & Lemons’ posting on 45 Christmas Breakfast Ideas (just ahead of avocado toast). The bagel – a word thought to be derived from the Yiddish “beigen,” or to bend – has assimilated so thoroughly that it can appear at Christmas celebrations without attracting any special notice. Several bagel makers in the area were surprised to even be asked about their Christmas season sales, replying to questions with some version of, “Oh, I never thought of that.”

“In one way, I think it’s really important to honor traditions and where they came from and respect the sources from which they were birthed,” said Reid, of Scratch. “There are so many food traditions that are connecting to place and people and their own rearing. It is really important to respect that.”

But, she added, “I’m awful glad people really love bagels.”

A BRIEF HISTORY 

The bagel has plenty of ring-shaped bread predecessors (both the circle and the hole hold significance), but Maria Balinska, in her fascinating “The Bagel: The Surprising History of a Modest Bread” finds the first written mention specifically of bagels in Krawkow, Poland, in 1610 when the city’s Jewish Council issued rules overseeing their consumption.

In subsequent centuries, bagels appeared often in Poland in Jewish rhymes, songs, folklore and proverbs. By the 19th century, the number of Jewish bagel bakers in Poland was on the rise, Balinska writes, and bagels had become a popular market snack for both Jews and gentiles because they were “easy to eat and easy to carry,” two of the same characteristics that make them popular today.

The bagel arrived in the United States in the late 19th century, brought to New York by Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. (Pizza, another immigrant culinary success story, came at the same time with Italians.) In New York’s Lower East Side, bagel peddlers were soon a common sight, their wares threaded securely onto dowels and sold from pushcarts or market baskets.

The bagel bakers at the time toiled in dreadful conditions, filthy and scorching hot, but they soon unionized and, in the first half of the 20th century, fought several fierce union battles. When the Portland Evening Express carried an Associated Press report of a work slowdown on Dec. 17, 1951 – headlined “New York Faces Bagel Famine” – it felt the need (high up in the story’s second paragraph) to explain a few things to its readers.

“Thousands of New Yorkers, who normally eat more than a million bagels (pronounced bay-gle) on a week-end went without the hard dough-nut (with hole) shaped bread roll Sunday,” the AP wrote.

In Maine at the time, the bagel remained a distinctly a Jewish food. In a piece for Colby College’s Maine Jewish History Project, Beth Hillson recollected her childhood in an Orthodox Jewish Community in Old Town in the 1950s, in which her dual identities as a Mainer and a Jew were intertwined. She described “delicious” Sunday night suppers with her grandparents, eating traditional New England baked beans with bagels and lox.

And when Peter Beckerman spoke with The Maine Jewish History Project about his youth in Waterville, also in the 1950s, he recollected that “I might be called by my good friends, just joking around, ‘bagel eater.’ We might call a Lebanese a ‘camel jockey.’ They didn’t even know what a bagel was or if I ever ate a bagel, and certainly they’ve never been on a camel and, you know, didn’t associate themselves back in Lebanon with the desert, but we had fun with it,” he said.

Around the 1970s, the bagel’s horizons in the U.S. began to expand. The 1965 Immigration Act was already altering the country’s makeup, and so-called “ethnic” food was increasingly popular. A certain Harry Lender (and later his sons) took advantage, selling frozen, sliced Lender’s bagels nationwide, a business venture Balinska details in a chapter titled “The ‘Bagelising’ of America.”

“They called them the Jewish English muffin,” remembered Dawn LaRochelle, director of the Maine Jewish Museum, “and I still remember the ads for it.”

Which brings us, more or less, to today.

A NEW CHRISTMAS TRADITION?

Confession: We weren’t fully transparent when we quoted Liel Leibovitz ‘s essay on the bagel up top. Leibovitz went on in that piece to call the bagel “the least Jewish food in the world.” The bagel, he wrote, has “ascended to the throne of America’s most popular breakfast bun … you belong to all of America now.”

Correction: all of the world. Mitchell Davis, a global culinary consultant who lives in New York and is author of the 2002 “The Mensch Chef,” said he’s fallen into the habit of taking photos of bagels wherever he goes.

“I have 10 million pictures of bagels in every place I travel,” he said – OK, a slight exaggeration – as he scrolled through his phone. “I could send you pictures all over Japan, in every bakery, in every sandwich place. Italy. Paris. There is nowhere now that you don’t get bagels. Bagel shops in Sweden. Bagel shops in Spain. Yeah, everywhere. Here they are in Korea, and they are filled with ang butter, which is red-bean paste and big slabs of butter.

“That’s the schmear,” he laughed.

Just what type of bagel sells best at Christmastime? You might think seasonal flavors like pumpkin, or gingerbread or peppermint (OK, that last one’s made up, and it sounds ghastly). But no. Local bagel bakers reported that at Christmastime, and pretty much at every other time time of year, too, everything bagels are the most popular – which feels, somehow, inclusive and apt for the holiday season. Lender’s, incidentally, famously made green bagels for St. Patrick’s Day.

Asked what he made of high-volume Christmastime sales of a bread once thought of as Jewish as matzoh ball soup, Chad Conley, of Rose Foods, at first demurred, saying it’d take a cultural anthropologist to answer the question. But after reflecting a moment, he took a stab at it.

“I keep thinking that they are the same shape as the Christmas wreath? Maybe there is something to that?” he said tentatively, and then laughed. “People are just reminded every day during the Christmas season when they come home from work, and they see this round shape at their door.”

Rover’s Kim Rutter said she doesn’t think her customers necessarily identify bagels as Jewish. “My experience owning Rover is such that it’s more of a regional argument than a cultural one. We hear from people who want to make sure we know they’re from New York or New Jersey and let us know it’s not the style that they’re used to.”

When she was a girl, Christmas breakfast was her mom’s sour cream coffee cake. “She still makes it,” Rutter said. “I’m 36 years old, and I’ve probably had it 35 times. The recipe comes from that red Betty Crocker Cookbook.” A new mom herself, Rutter will be going to her parents this Christmas and is looking forward to the family coffee cake, “so (five-month-old baby Cole) can have the same traditions.”

She and other bagel bakers said that bagel sales spike at every holiday at which Mainers gather, religious or not. Sales go up for Thanksgiving, New Year’s, school vacation weeks and Easter, too, they said, for a host of reasons. (Also at some shops, for the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur, when Jews customarily eat a meal of bagels, lox and all the fixings to break a daylong religious fast.) Bagels are convenient. They’re grab-and-go. People can make a single stop at a bagel shop, and minutes later – bagels and cream cheese in hand – check “brunch prep” off their holiday to-do lists. And if guests drop in unexpectedly for the holidays, it’s a snap to put out a tray of bagels.

“I would say it’s become part of the ritual of celebration and not even part of a religion,” Kern Desjarlais said. “It’s just a celebratory spread. The big midday spread. People just love them.”

“Bagels are so American at this point that many people have no idea there was a Jewish connection,” said Colby Professor of Jewish Studies David Freidenreich, who is also the author of the 2014 “Foreigners and their Food: Constructing Otherness in Jewish, Christian and Islamic Law.” “Most people don’t. Why should they?”

BAGELS FOR ALL

We live in an era of intense cultural sensitivity, at a time when it’s not uncommon to hear terms like “cultural appropriation” and lack of “contextualization” about particular cuisines (Indian, Chinese, Mexican, Vietnamese …) and dishes (curry, chop suey, barbacoa, banh mi).

But bagels do not seem to be getting that sort of pushback. If anything, the opposite.

“I always think of food as the ultimate bridge builder. Breaking bread together has from time immemorial been a way that people have shared each other’s lives,” LaRochelle said. “Christmas breakfast? It doesn’t bother me in the least.

“Somehow in my head, even if people aren’t consciously aware that they are eating Jewish food at Christmas, there is something seeping into their unconscious,” she said, “or I like to think of it that way, that then helps create greater harmony between different cultures.”

To borrow the Yiddish expression “fun dayn moyl in gots oyern” – “from your mouth to God’s ears.”

Jane and Joel Baker may have been making the same point as they cheerily signed off a telephone call earlier in December.

“Happy Hanukkah and Merry Christmas!” Jane Baker said.

“We consider it a blessing that our community wants to include us in their family festivities,” Joel Baker added.

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