For some reason, Christmas is the time of year when I become the most nostalgic about the past. And Christmas nostalgia almost always means one thing to me.

Crestline.

My Christmases were never whiter, the air never colder and crisper and the Christmas cookies never better tasting than they were in the small town in north central Ohio where my grandparents lived and where my mother was born. My earliest Christmas memory is of 1953 -- I think -- when I found a Lionel electric train set waiting for me under the tree, but I also remember going to Christmas Eve services at the old church my grandmother attended and riding out to the newer homes on the west end of town to see the Christmas lights.

Crestline was one of those wonderful little railroad towns that did so much for the troops during World War II. Bob Greene wrote a book about North Platte, Neb., and the canteen for soldiers who were passing through on their way to combat, but there were a lot more towns than North Platte doing the same thing. <a title="Crestline Canteen" href="http://canteenbooks.com/Crestline_canteen.htm" target="_self">Crestline</a> served food and drinks to more than 1.2 million soldiers from 1942-46, and just like the other canteens, all the food was donated and given away for free.

[caption id="attachment_697" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="The Crestline canteen"]<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Crestline-painting.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-697" title="Crestline painting" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Crestline-painting-300x154.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="154" /></a>[/caption]

It makes me sad to think that I both loved and ridiculed Crestline so much when I was younger. I treasure the memories of the times I spent there, but I remember thinking how horrible it would be to live in a town that was too small even to have a fast-food restaurant until the 1970s.

I usually spent two weeks there each summer, and I spent most of that time reading books I checked out of the small library and playing ball in the park. Crestline was small enough that I was able to walk everywhere I went, and I walked all the time. I remember picking up pop bottles and turning them in to get money to buy comic books and baseball cards. I wonder what happened to all those late '50s and early '60s comic books and baseball cards. They'd probably be worth quite a bit now.

There's a great irony in the fact that all those times in Crestline, I dreamed of living in big cities, but after 20 years in one of the biggest -- Los Angeles -- my choice in retiring was to move to a small city in the South.

Griffin is four times the size of Crestline, and it's just 10-15 minutes outside the Atlanta metropolitan area, but it has a lot more in common with Crestline than it does with Atlanta or Los Angeles.

I wonder if that's why it feels like home to me.