Like Santa without elves, Steve VanderWiede would never survive the Christmas crunch without truckers. VanderWiede grows Christmas trees, 4,500 acres of them. And every year, midway through November, VanderWiede needs to put 450,000 of those trees on wheels.

And that's where the truckers come in. In just under three weeks, 50 to 60 trucks a day show up at the Dutchman's Tree Farm near Lake City, Mich. When it's all over, 700 trucks have rolled in and out the Dutchman driveway, bound for points north, south, east and west, every one of 'em hauling a big old load of Christmas.

The trucks show up early. "We're loading by 7 a.m.," says VanderWiede, "and we go until the last truck is out. We hope to finish by 7 or 8 p.m." It's a hectic scene - trucks coming and going, tree handling crews hefting, hauling and stacking, customers calling, and load bosses zipping from yard to yard, talking into their radios constantly.

The center of all the activity is a bright, modest office attached to a clean machine shop. Over on one end of the machine shop, several picnic tables are set up, and draped in red-and-green tablecloths decorated with Christmas scenes. Drivers and crew alike are welcome to the food.

But this is not your cookies and milk for Santa snack. It's a heartwarming, hearty, homemade array: cinnamon rolls, beef stroganoff, taco soup, sauerkraut and savory kielbasa.

"We do an in-house food program where we're basically feeding our employees and the truckers as they come and go," says VanderWiede. "It's hot and filling." It's a simple touch, but VanderWiede feels it's an important one. He is especially concerned that truckers leave the tree farm happy. "The trucker is very key to our business," says VanderWiede.

"We only sell our product to our customers one time each year. Our whole business depends on that relationship. And generally, that customer's initial opinion of the quality of the load of trees can be swayed from good to bad by the attitude of that trucker. So the attitude and the mindset of that trucker when he leaves our yard is critical," VanderWiede says.

Load, lock and go!

If a well-fed trucker is a happy trucker, a trucker who doesn't have to fiddle around waiting for a load is really happy. It's a business where all the loading has to be done outside, and many loads are made up of several different types of trees from different areas. VanderWiede has done all he can to streamline the process, from pre-setting trees to providing free stakes for those who need them.

"You really need hardwood stakes for these loads, so we provide those and rope to tie the load together. Otherwise drivers go to a lumberyard and get pine, and the pines aren't strong enough. We also have a guy here fitting them into their pockets, because they're not an exact cut."

Upon arrival, drivers are given a copy of the order, a numbered window placard, and a map to the three loading yards. The yards are tucked into groves of red pines. Cut trees dehydrate quickly - storing them out of the wind and sun under cover of the red pines, where temperatures are 10 degrees lower, extends their shelf life dramatically.

The red pines are planted in rows, some of which have been widened to allow trucks easy access for loading. Once the trucks arrive, crews begin loading immediately, working from the loading list.

"We try to minimize the drivers' stops in our yard," VanderWiede says, "but it's rare we can load them in one stop. It depends on how many [different] customers are actually going to be on a truck."

The crews put plastic netting between the drops, and drivers are given a map of the load. Trees are pre-bundled in netting, tagged with barcodes, and colored tags. The yard bosses run non-stop, moving elevators, checking crews, guiding truckers, and tracking down missing trees.

Dispatcher sees forest and trees

For a while I rode with a yard boss named Ray. An elevator had broken, and in between hauling it away and locating a replacement, he was in search of a misplaced packet of trees. "I need five Black Hills for Judy's Garden Center," he hollered into his radio as we zipped up and down the red pine rows in his pickup.

He spends much of his day this way, on a semi-frantic scavenger hunt. "We try to keep things moving," said Ray. "Otherwise we lose our rhythm." As we jumped out of the truck and trotted away for the sixth time in five minutes, he looked back over his shoulder at me. "The first thing you gotta remember," he grinned, "is where you park."

Most of the trees are hand-loaded by crews. But for the past few years, VanderWiede has been running a palletizer that packs several trees on a standard pallet. "We only do it for a couple of customers," says VanderWiede, "but it works well." The palletized trees are loaded by forklift from a concrete dock located in the middle of a tall grove of white pines.

VanderWiede gives much of the credit for the tree shipping operation to office manager and dispatcher Theresa Ladd. "Not only has she developed a real rapport with individual truckers, but also with other trucking companies and dispatchers, to the point where she manages to find us enough trucks every day. I don't know how she does it."

It takes all kinds

Dutchman ships trees on all sorts of trucks. "Flatbeds, reefers, vans, gravel trains," says VanderWiede. "And cattle trailers. We ship some trees to Canada every year in cattle trailers. In a van or a reefer, you tend to get less wind dehydration, especially if you're going a long way, to Texas or Arizona, but generally, on the shorter hauls, an 8- to 10-hour night run, quality really isn't affected. On long hauls, we sometimes use nursery tarps. It's like a shade cloth. A solid tarp flops - a nursery tarp breathes."

Some truckers have turned the trek to the Dutchman Tree Farm into an annual holiday tradition. "I don't know what percentage are repeat haulers, but there's quite a group that comes back every year," says VanderWiede.

"They just like hauling Christmas trees. It's something that's a change of pace that time of year, and it becomes a Christmas ritual. Some put a wreath on their grill.

"One driver always hauls to a Christmas tree salesman in Florida, and after the delivery, they go out for dinner. A lot of the drivers get warm fuzzies going down the road loaded with Christmas trees."

Lest we get carried away with the spirit of Christmas, VanderWiede chuckles and adds, "Of course, some are just here because the broker sent them here." Out by the palletizer, I ask a driver in a big purple Kenworth if he gets a kick out of hauling Christmas trees. He's busy with some paperwork. "It's like just about anything else," he says. "If it's inside the trailer, it'll go down the road."

May only Christmas be white

Weather is the Grinch that can throw a giant monkey wrench into the Dutchman system. "Snowstorms are the real killers," says VanderWiede. "The worst scenario is an all-night rain that freezes, then dumps a couple of feet of snow on top of that. That's almost an impossibility" to work in, he said.

The day of my visit, it was windy and bitterly cold, but the sun was bright and the only snow in sight was a light dusting on some of the bundled trees in the sheltered loading yards. The trucks were rolling in and out at a good clip. The loading crews were going non-stop. Well, almost. Work at the dock stopped for a moment when one of the off-duty crew stopped by to show off a beautiful whitetail buck.

Back behind the dispatch area, around a corner and out of sight, VanderWiede was at his desk, on the phone with a customer. He had been there since 5 a.m., and would be there until late that night. Ironically, when the trees he tends so carefully all year long leave, he isn't outside to see them go.

"I have been blessed with tremendous employees that pretty much run this operation," he says, "but there needs to be someone where the buck stops. My partner Joe Hoekwater is awesome - I tend to run the office end of it, and he runs the yard end of it, because it's a job I can't do by myself. A lot of what I do is customer relations. If the customer has a problem, I make the call. And I also deal with employees. The hours here are long, tempers get short."

Out in the yards, watching the trees handled and hauled by the thousands, it's easy to simply marvel at the organized hustle-bustle. But at one point I ducked behind the southern side of a big white pine and found a whole different world. The wind was blocked, and the sun had warmed the adjacent bundle of trees just enough to release the fragrance of needles and pitch.

I picked one tree in the bundle and tried to imagine it tucked in a corner of some living room, decorated simply or garishly, surrounded by pajama-footed children, or an elderly couple sipping eggnog in overstuffed chairs.

Peace on earth - we humans can't seem to get that one right. But these trees suggest we haven't given up. They'll travel to big houses, little houses, apartments and trailers, where each one will draw young and old into a circle of good will.