There may be many correct ways to eat a bagel, but this is one of the rare wrong ways.
Butter.
I do cream cheese and lingonberry jam on english muffins as a rare treat.
I will make flavored butter [garlic and italian herb is excellent, or lemon zest and thyme is also good] for things like toast, bagels or english muffins - I don’t mind adding the carbs for the toasty treat, but jams and jellies are usually too full of sugar for me to add in.
Back when I ate bagels (they’re too much of a carb hit for me now), I’d toast them and put butter on them. But, then again, I’m absolutely a gentile. 
I think you counted wrong, as cream cheese and grape jelly together is like chewy, gooey cheesecake and to 12 year old me , the only way to eat bagels.
Now that I’m a little older I’m also partial to toasted with butter or toasted with a good schmeer, capers and smoked salmon.
I like them either way. My daughter always uses cream cheese and my husband always uses butter. An onion or everything bagel toasted with butter is very nice, same for cinnamon raisin.
Raindrops on roses,
And whiskers on kittens,
Butter on bagels,
And eaten with mittens…
Dyspeptic talk show hosts
Tied up with string
These are a few of my favorite things?!
Maybe that’s why I prefer butter over cream cheese too.
Since we’re discussing bagels, I have found there are some people who are absolute purists when it comes to varieties. Only plain, pumpernickel, poppyseed, onion, and sesame are acceptable. Everything else is not a “true” bagel and an abomination (especially if it has berries or raisins). With that in mind, what’s the consensus on sourdough bagels?
That’s almost me. However garlic would be okay, egg is great, and everything bagels are fine also.
Now if someone closer than the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco had bialys. There were good frozen ones in my grocery, but they vanished despite my buying them every week.
Onion is good, but too much trouble in the morning. I’m fine with it when I have lox and bagels out, but at those prices I need every calorie I can get.
A dreaded bagel sandwich. Works for the modern roll with a hole soft bagel, but try it with a real bagel and egg will be flying everywhere.
Salt bagels as well.
That’s why it’s soft curd. To put around the hole. And it isn’t any more of a mess than cream cheese and jelly.
I’m a buttered bagel person. Usually sesame seed, but egg, onion, plain, garlic all work for me. Sometimes I have to have a nice turkey sandwich out of egg or plain, but that’s a once or twice a year thing. If I get a fresh one from a good bagel place or make them myself, I’ll eat them plain. But it has to be fresh and HQ.
I get them fron Dunkin Donuts from time to time. They’re not authentic NYC bagels by any stretch of the imagination, but they’re usually decent enough for the price/convenience factor. I’m getting really annoyed with them now though and don’t get them any more because they don’t put the butter ON the bagel. I get a toasted bagel wrapped in paper chucked into a paper bag with a plastic knife and some frozen pats of butter. So by the time I notice this the bagel is always too cold to melt cool or warm butter, but as it’s hard as a rock, it’s definitely not going to happen. And you can’t re-toast the if you bring them home because often they’re too dark around the edges for further toastering. 
Before they’d smear gobs of butter on them and they were a decadent treat. Now it’s a sack of disappointment.
Me too. greasy high-five
Meat, egg,and cheese vehicle for me.
So, no-one like a little schmear of schmaltz? That’s on a wholegrain bagel of course.
This is what it’s all about. Though I prefer it with strawberry jam…Hmmmm.
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One of the best things in life is to put butter and honey on a toasted cinnamon raisin bagel and let it melt.