Come Christmastime, the excitement builds early around Ian Muggridge's East Galt, Ontario, house. For any home with children it's a magical time of year, but for the three junior Muggridges, early inheritors of their father's enthusiasm for classic hand-blown glass ornaments, the season starts with a much-anticipated shopping excursion. “We have a ritual,” explains Ian, a personal chef and magazine food stylist. “Every November, we go to the Sugar Plum Fair (a National Ballet of Canada fund-raiser held in Toronto) and the children choose ornaments. They're absolutely mad about them.”
Certainly, at the ages of four, eight and 10, Rose, Daisy and Ted are well versed in the romance of the season, and know a well-dressed tree when they see one. The ones they themselves decorate are a feast for the eyes-similar in style to those of High-Victorian England, when German glass ornaments were all the vogue, and people piled them on trees, along with tinsel and toys. It's a tree like this, in all its glory, that stands as the family's quintessential English Christmas tree—a far cry from the trees of Ian's own English childhood, which he remembers with bemusement as being silver, artificial, and decorated in 30 minutes flat.
Things took a turn for the traditional when Ian met his late wife, the stylish Canadian writer Nancy Jane Hastings, who presented him with a box of 12 hand-blown glass cabbage rose ornaments as a birthday gift shortly after their marriage. It was the start of a collection that would give them both, and now their three children, inestimable pleasure. “It's one of the most romantic gifts I can think of,” he says.
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