When my husband’s old Lionel train set arrived by UPS from his brother in Michigan, it was as though Santa himself appeared in a big brown truck. It was five years ago, Christmas Eve. I was standing in the driveway with our two children, who were 5 and 7 at the time, when the driver headed our way with a large cardboard box.

Carefully packed inside was the electric model train set that my husband, Chris, and his three brothers used to play with each winter in the basement of their home outside Detroit. It had been his father’s before that. And now, on the most magical night of all, it had arrived in San Jose for the next generation, just in time. I choked back tears as I wished the driver a Merry Christmas.

Sounds like the end of a heartwarming story, doesn’t it? This was the part when the parents are supposed to embrace and the children open the box with eyes filled with wonder. Can’t cha hear the whistle blowing?

Funny how nostalgia can turn to exasperation and a midnight argument last week that almost woke up the kids. Where in the world can we set up this thing?
Unlike my husband’s boyhood home in the 1960s and ’70s, our home doesn’t have a giant basement rec room with a snooker table big enough for two full sheets of plywood on top to serve as a platform for this Michigan-made train set.

Without it, the track never really found a home in our house. That first Christmas, the engine that had been boxed up for 30 years was too worn out to pull cars behind it. The next two years, when the track was laid on the living-room floor, the kids kept tripping over it, knocking down the cars and disconnecting the track. In 2007, Chris placed a piece of plywood on top of the dining table on the screened porch. But it was chilly, few ventured outside to play with it and the track started to rust. Last year, it didn’t even make it out of the boxes.

This year, though, Chris insisted the train and the plywood come back in the house and into the living room. And it had to be elevated, he said. That’s when the discord began.
I’m sorry, but am I out of line to protest when my husband wants to squeeze in the equivalent of a table set for 12 in the middle of our cramped living room that is barely big enough for a Christmas tree? Must this be a shrine to Lionel?

I already had holiday decorating insecurities. As much as I envision our house as an enchanted space filled with our hand-carved nativity scene, nutcrackers, Christmas candelabras and poinsettias, it more often than not feels like a mismatched montage.
To make matters worse, we were planning a Christmas cocktail party, plus Christmas dinner for 18. We needed more room, not less, for entertaining.

“Hmm, an 8-foot-by-4-foot sheet of plywood in your living room,” mused my friend Carolyn. “Sounds like a dance floor.”
One friend suggested that if we really wanted to show off the train set, we should deconstruct it and arrange the engine and cars artfully on the mantel. Another suggested building a catwalk around the ceiling like they do at pizza parlors. All we needed was sawdust and peanut shells on the floor. Great.

But the tradition of this train set was important to Chris and I understood why. The train set was sent a few years after Chris’ father died. It wasn’t an elaborate model with mountains and tunnels, but it included some special vintage pieces: a 1940s O gauge track with a pressed-tin signal house and a man with a swinging lantern who pops through the door when the train passes; a foot-tall light tower; three pieces of die-cast rolling stock; a 1975 Illinois Central GP9 engine that blows smoke and a matching caboose that lights up. It came with a bag of miniature pedestrians, benches and trees. Inside the GP9 engine box was the original handwritten note the boys found that Christmas morning when they unwrapped it for the first time: “Merry Christmas, Joey, Chris, Paul and Ed.” It was signed S. Claus.

Still, did it have to be mounted full scale, table height, smack in the middle of the living room? Couldn’t it be, maybe, half the size, in a corner somewhere? Midnight is the wrong time to have a conversation like this. When I imagined Chris pulling out the sheet of dirty white felt he used under the track to look like snow two years ago, I marched upstairs.

As we got ready for bed, though, Chris said one more thing: “I want the kids to have memories of this train.”
“I do, too,” I said.

The next morning, Chris said that the train didn’t have to be table height. It could sit on milk crates just a foot off the floor. But something would still have to be moved out for it to fit in. I volunteered that my writing desk be moved to the shed.
We could still sit a 6-foot Christmas tree on top of the platform in the middle of the track. I would replace the white felt with chocolate brown burlap.
And to convince myself that I could salvage some sense of style, I would sew a string of silky brown pom-poms to finish the bottom edge. (Chris objected at first, worried they would distract from the track, but relented.)

Last weekend, Daniel, who is 10 now, helped his father assemble the track. Claire, 12, set up a station vignette around the signal house. It was a rainy afternoon and I took in the scene as Chris plugged in the twinkling tree lights and turned on the Christmas music. Daniel blew the whistle.
As the train came around the bend, I approached the platform, knelt down before it, and fluffed the pompom skirt.