Heritage Holiday Mah Jongg Ornament - The Big Joker

New York has a joker, and the rest of the world's mahjong does not. The Big Joker from a 1930s butterscotch Bakelite set — BIG across the top, the little seated figure in his cap, JOKER along the bottom — cut into the tile the way the old sets were cut and printed on clear crystal. Green ink on yellowed bone, and nothing else.

Mahjong came to New York in 1920 in the luggage of an oil man named Babcock, who had learned it in Shanghai, trademarked a spelling and printed a rulebook. By 1923 the city had lost its mind over it: department stores sold sets by the thousand, hotels ran tables in the ballrooms, and the sheet-music counters stocked songs about it. The craze burned out in two years the way crazes do. What it left behind was a game played in apartments — in Brooklyn, on the Upper West Side, out on Long Island as the families moved — by women who kept it going for a decade after the rest of the country quit. In 1937 a group of them founded a league in the city to settle the arguments, and the way they settled them was to publish a card: a new set of winning hands every spring, good for one year, and then a new card. Eighty-some years on, the card still comes out of New York every year, the game still takes 152 tiles with eight jokers, it still opens with the Charleston, and nobody east of the Hudson calls it anything but mahj.

A three-inch clear crystal ornament with a faceted edge, the engraving printed to the glass so the cut lettering reads like the real tile held to a window. The suits are all there in spirit — bams, cracks, dots, the winds, the dragons the old sets called soap, the flowers — but the joker is the tile that tells you whose game this is, because only the American game has one. The ink is a single faded green, as it was on the sets our grandmothers played on.

For the table that has met every Tuesday since before the children were born, the daughter who finally learned the card, the mother who taught her, the friend who moved to Boca and still flies up for the game, and anyone who has ever been told to pass three to the left.

He is not a jester. On the old Bakelite sets the joker was a seated figure in a cap, and we kept him exactly that way.

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.