Guest Voice: Chris Whitley

See Below for Information about Chris

The Poaching of the Pines

Fifty-five or so Decembers ago, when I was about 10, I witnessed the tragic death of a family Christmas tradition. It was delivered to our front door in, fittingly, a huge coffin-sized cardboard box from Sears.

Contained in that carton was a concept completely foreign to the Whitley household. An artificial Christmas tree, some (actually quite a lot of) assembly required. It was a six-foot abomination of painted wood sections, a cold, sterile, metal stand, and dozens of unnatural limbs of various lengths, each composed of twisted wire and two-tone green plastic pine “needles” with color-coded stubs that allegedly corresponded to the holes pre-drilled into the fake trunk. It did not smell like any pine tree I’d ever sniffed in my young life. It smelled like an oil change at Taney Houseman’s garage.

This holiday icon of petrochemical wonder and joy arrived at our doorstep with several smaller boxes full of something called Della Robbia fruit, which I learned were little clumps of fake apples, oranges, pears, grapes, for use as ornaments on the fake tree. Even completely assembled and adorned with a whole produce section of fake plastic fruit, our new fake tree was not fooling me, and yeah, it looked okay, but it didn’t particularly impress me, not like it did for our Mother, who had picked it all out of the big Sears Wish Book and was totally thrilled with it. I don’t recall that Dad was especially turned on by this new thing, either, but if it made Hazel happy, it made Roy happy, too, and therefore the rest of us, myself and my three big brothers, would end up liking it just fine, eventually.

Except I never really did fully embrace the plastic tannenfake, despite the fact that it served as a powerful magnet for nice presents for four generations of Whitleys over a little more than two decades. As prefab trees go, it enjoyed a long and happy life. 

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What I really missed that first year it came into our home, and what I’ve missed every year since then, was the tradition we enjoyed as kids, that of helping Dad cut a real live tree and dragging it into the house for decorating. 

For most of his life, Dad’s Christmas standard was a native red cedar tree, cut right from our farm. That’s how it was for many Ozarks households of his generation, a tradition that many families of our region still honor. But at some point before I was born, Dad acquired a preference for white pine trees, and it was then that he, with my three older brothers as eager co-conspirators, first broke bad into an annual criminal holiday ritual.

You see, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, there were no white pine trees growing on our farm, and the notion of Christmas tree lots, Christmas tree farms, or lumber yards selling Christmas trees was not yet a thing. But there was a magical place, not quite a dozen miles to the north of our farm, up H Highway, that was just chock full of them.

The place was the Mark Twain National Forest. The fact that this land and its trees were the property of the U.S. Government did very little to dissuade many local families, ours included, from slipping down any of several side roads, deep into the stands of pine, and harvesting a fresh, natural Christmas tree.

Among my earliest and best Christmas memories are of those times in early Decembers when my Dad, my brothers, and I would climb into his pickup truck, Homelite chain saw and hatchets in tow, and point ourselves toward Chadwick for the annual pine poaching.

Occasionally we’d run into friends and neighbors out there, doing the same thing as us (just picking up a few pine cones, Officer, nothing to see here), but usually we were alone in our pursuit. Once the Perfect Tree was cut, it was hustled into the back of the truck and taken back to Dad’s shop, where it was made Even More Perfect. This was achieved by Dad or Brother John applying a Skill power drill bit to bare spots in the trunk, into which they’d carefully fit separately harvested limbs and twigs of pine. From there, it was introduced to the house, where it would deliver a wonderful natural woodsy scent well past New Year’s Day.

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That all of this activity involved a series of federal criminal offenses certainly escaped me at a tender age, and even when I was older it never particularly haunted me in any way at all, aside from the sweet memories that would come wafting back any time I’d be near the fragrance of a real white pine Christmas tree.

Well, except for once. I do remember being in my early 30s, some years later when I worked for the federal prosecutor in Kansas City, and being invited out for a holiday lunch with a small group of Assistant U.S. Attorneys. Our table talk turned to favorite childhood Christmas memories, and I told the tale of the Taking of the Trees. I will never forget the look of revulsion that came across the face of one of our younger prosecutors, and his repeated yelps of “that’s against the law!” that echoed across the restaurant. I will warmly remember the howls of laughter that came from the rest of the table.

Even though the statute of limitations for my own prosecution had long passed, I decided not to follow up with any stories about the moonshiner in our family. Some people only deserve so much for Christmas.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Chris Whitley is a native of Taney County. Born in Branson and raised in Forsyth, he spent the first decade of his career as a reporter, columnist and editor for newspapers in Springfield. He then spent 26 years in Kansas City, Jefferson City, and Springfield, working in public information and crisis communications positions for two federal government agencies, two regional hospital systems, and Missouri state government, prior to his retirement in 2017. He now resides in Hollister.