Christmas presents aren’t always for kids. Sometimes, they’re for the father to play with, which is why I got my first electric train when I was 11 months old — an O-gauge Lionel set that cost $80, which in December 1948 was a scale-model fortune.

Setting up the train was a holiday tradition that lasted until I left home, being resurrected briefly in 1973 on behalf of my then-wife’s 2-year-old son Brian.

The steam locomotive came with pellets that puffed clouds of smoke when we put them into the stack. Its whistle sounded like that of a real steam engine and was joined in the mid-1950s by a diesel loco set with a diesel horn — an acquisition that gave us enough cars to put together a fantastic train.

A motorized refrigerator car housed a crewman who flung open the doors and set milk cans out onto the platform, and a timber car dumped logs at the touch of a button. A boxcar had a brakeman who stood on its roof until warning cables made him duck before the train went into a tunnel, and a second set of cables brought him back to his feet.

Eventually, we added HO-gauge trains, one of which included a chubby little 1880s-era steam engine Dad called “The Mouse” because of the way it scurried around the track.

Our Christmas yards included ranks of metal soldiers and cannon, delicate miniature horse-drawn carriages, a water tower and light poles that were survivors of the spectacular display my grandparents once set up. Their standard-gauge Lionel train had huge cars, and the layout was of such grand size and contained so many wonderful elements that the Keyser newspaper ran a picture of it.

All I ever saw of it was a few rusting cars and some track in a battered cardboard box on a shelf during one of my few childhood visits to their basement. I’ve often wondered what happened to it, sadly concluding that someone must have decided it was unsalvageable and consigned it to the trash.

Our train yard took weeks to assemble, beginning right after Thanksgiving dinner. It filled a ping-pong table and was covered with rolls of cotton that made it look like fresh snow had fallen on our Plasticville village.

The streets were filled with people, cars and school buses, and every building was lighted. So much wiring was required that Dad told our friends the underside of it looked like the innards of a pinball machine. The platform was mounted on sawhorses and surrounded by an apron of crepe paper that resembled a brick wall.

A comforting glow filled our home. The steam radiators hissed warmly, the aroma of my mother’s baking cookies drifted throughout the downstairs, and soft lights gleamed on the Christmas tree and in all of the windows.

Mom arranged a small church and churchyard on the TV, and she filled every flat surface in the living room and dining room with Santa Clauses, sleighs laden with tiny wrapped presents, prancing reindeer, singing angels, crystalline snowflakes, snowcouples (snowmen and snowwomen) and a pair of ceramic ice skaters bundled up in Victorian clothes that I now leave out all year long because they were her favorites.

Love abounded there, and when family and friends came to visit, the house itself seemed to come alive.

Running the trains was a significant event. As we slowly turned the throttles on the transformers, the locomotives’ headlights brightened, and they hummed with power. I liked to put my young face down near the curves in the track, where I could watch the trains speed toward me before bending away at the last second. The distinctive sound they made lingers in my mind, even though I haven’t heard it for 35 years.

Dad enjoyed telling folks about the time he put the track together after knocking back three or four Tom and Jerrys — a concoction of boiling water, spicy egg-and-sugar batter and booze that’s like eggnog with afterburners.

“I made a figure-eight without using a crossover piece,” he said, “and I’ve never been able to remember out how I did it.”

Christmas is different now — which doesn’t mean it’s any less important — and my trains are waiting until they are needed again; time doesn’t pass for them as it does for me. And who knows? Spirit and circumstance might someday conspire in such a way that I will be the next one who gets them out to play with.

After my father died, I spent hours in our old home, looking for things I didn’t want to leave in an unoccupied house.

While I was out in the garage, an insistent little voice told me to get the ladder and climb up to look in the rafters. It was there I found a box containing the once-magnificent train set whose grimy remnants I’d last seen as a child in my grandparents’ basement.

After the astonishment and other emotions began to subside, the questions began to flow: Why did my father put his parents’ train outside in the garage instead of the basement, along with its companion pieces that he’d packed up, labeled and stored so carefully? How long had it been there? How did it get there? Dad could not have put it there by himself because polio had left him unable to raise his right hand high enough to lift it. Why hadn’t he told me about the train so we could fix it up? We used to do things like that. And where was the engine?

Long afterward, I noticed a vague memory of my father sitting up in his hospital bed a few weeks before he died, telling me “I’ve got Dad’s train, but the locomotive is gone. I don’t know where it is. Maybe he gave it to someone to have it fixed and never got it back.”

But if we really had that conversation, why did it take me months to recall it? I remembered other things we talked about, and this would have stuck in my mind because it resolved a mystery that bothered me for years. I’d have asked him where the train was and retrieved it. Its sudden discovery wouldn’t have shocked me the way it did.

Some folks talk and act as though the Lord has told them all there is to know about the universe. He’s been kinder to me, telling me only what I need to know and keeping me guessing about many other things I will have a ball trying to figure out on my own.

Not having an explanation for mysteries like my grandparents’ train adds an element of magic to my life. Was it there all along? Had my father simply asked someone younger and stronger to put it there and neglected to tell me? Had he told me about it, only for me to forget? Or did he and my grandfather retrieve it from a place lost in time and leave it for me to discover, telling me about it in what may or may not have been a dream?

It doesn’t matter. A friend of mine now has our train and is painstakingly restoring it. It’s a family heirloom, and I am only its temporary custodian.

This wasn’t the first time I’ve found something I needed to find in a place where it had no reason to be ... sometimes in a place where I’d already looked and found nothing ... and it isn’t always something I can touch.

How does it work? I don’t understand, nor do I want to. What I do know is that the greatest treasures are those the Lord and His angels have left with love for us to find in our hearts.

Merry Christmas.