19. Keeping It Quiet
My grandmother and my brother would sit under the Christmas tree playing with the train decoration running around it. She passed a few weeks before Christmas when I was very young. After her funeral, every night, at different times after midnight when we had all gone upstairs to bed, the train would turn itself on and my mom would go down and turn it off.
After a week, my mom exasperatedly yelled down the stairs “Enough, (grandma’s name), we miss you but we need sleep!” The train stopped and never turned itself back on again. After that Christmas, my mom refused to put a train under the tree. We gave it to our uncle who was a train enthusiast. He never had it turn on by itself after all these years.