The Christmas tree that launched a thousand guffaws when it was erected in downtown Montreal in early December has gone the way of all flesh–most likely to the nearest lumber mill.
Workers moved in Monday to strip the 26-metre balsam fir and haul it away.
Gone also are the stalls from the open air market over which the scrawny, lopsided and topless tree presided.
Call it a good idea gone bad.
Montreal’s tree, compared by some to an “ugly Christmas sweater,” generated all the wrong kind of publicity, creating a widespread backlash on social media, even spawning parody Twitter accounts in both French and English
Promoters had wanted to compete with the most famous Christmas tree in the world, the one by the skating rink at Rockefeller Center in New York by erecting a taller tree.
Even that didn’t happen.
By a quirk of fate, the Rockefeller Center tree usually measures 22 metres tall. This year it measured 28 metres–two feet taller than its scrawny Montreal cousin.
What happens next year when Montreal celebrates its 375th anniversary is anybody’s–and everybody’s–guess.
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