Heritage Holiday Mah Jongg Ornament - The Three Dragons

In Florida the game is called mahj, and the dragons know the way to every clubhouse. Three dragon tiles — gray, red and green — carved into yellowed bone and fanned on the glass, drawn in the fine black line of an old engraving and printed on clear crystal. The dragons carry the only color.

Take Boca Raton. It was incorporated in 1925 and got its hotel from Addison Mizner the year after, but the game arrived later, in the trunks of the cars that came down I-95 from New York and New Jersey in the 1960s and never quite went home. It settled in the card rooms of the country clubs and the gated communities west of Federal Highway, where by ten on a weekday morning there are eight tables going and the racks are already up. It is the American game, played off the card, with the Charleston and the jokers, and it is played hard: there are teachers in Boca who run a Tuesday class and a waiting list, tournament weekends at the clubhouses, cruises that leave Fort Lauderdale with a mahj deck booked solid, and a carpool from Delray that has not missed a Thursday in eleven years. The snowbirds carry the set down in November and home in April. The year-rounders keep the table warm in between. The same scene plays on a lanai in Naples, in a Sarasota card room and at a Palm Beach club, which is the point: if New York built the American game, Florida is where it retired to and kept playing, from the Gold Coast to the Gulf.

A three-inch clear crystal ornament with a faceted edge, the engraving printed to the glass so the carved tiles read like bone held up to the light. The three dragons are the honor tiles every set carries — red, green and white — and on an American set from the 1920s onward they were cut as dragons, which is how Grandma's set shows them and how we drew them. Faded gray, vermilion and jade on ivory, with the crackle of old bone.

For the Boca table and the Naples lanai, the Sarasota Tuesday game and the Palm Beach carpool, the teacher with the waiting list, the hostess who sets out the racks and the cocktail napkins, the snowbird who packs the set before the sweaters, and the mahj queen of any clubhouse in the state.

These are export-set dragons, the kind the American sets have carried since the 1920s. A Hong Kong set shows the characters instead; we made one of those too.

3-inch (76 mm) round crystal glass ornament, faceted gem-cut edge, white-backed print for crisp contrast, red ribbon hanger, white or gold gift box chosen at checkout, free U.S. shipping.