THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

And it all came about from trying to one up New York City.

The idea was to celebrate Montreal’s coming 375th anniversary with a Christmas tree bigger and grander than the famous one at Rockefeller Center in New York.

Instead, downtown Montreal wound up with something only Charlie Brown could love.

“It’s a bit of an eyesore,” said Noor Malick, who has a view of the tree from her office window.

A classic specimen, the tree is not. Its trunk is crooked, for one thing. And its other shortcomings are painfully obvious to passers-by. “It doesn’t have a top. It looks like it’s missing branches; it’s kind of skinny-looking,” Pierre Bourcier said after snapping a photo with his phone.

And then there are the ornaments: The tree is covered with red plastic inverted triangles topped by green maple leaves, the logo of the Canadian Tire retail chain, which supplied its white lights. A small child standing at the base of the tree this week stumped her father by asking why it “looked like a store.”

How did a holiday celebration became a municipal punch line? Chalk it up to (perhaps too much) ambition, inadequate financing and Murphy’s law.

“We have good intentions,” said Jean-David Pelletier, one of the principals of Sapin MTL, the company that came up with the idea of rivaling New York’s tree. “But the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and we had problems.”

Sapin MTL is in the business of home-delivering normal-size Christmas trees, and it proposed the big one as a promotional gimmick. Mr. Pelletier said the company had a more majestic, shapely tree in mind. It researched the typical height for recent Rockefeller Center trees — 74 to 76 feet — and found a 78-footer in Ontario that Mr. Pelletier described as “amazing.”

But its narrow height advantage vanished in early November when Rockefeller Center announced that its 2016 tree would be a 94-foot Norway spruce.

Mr. Pelletier and his partners then had less than a month to come up with a new, taller rival, and they appealed to the public, which suggested about 100 candidates. The balsam fir they chose came from the Eastern Townships of Quebec, near the border with the United States.

“It’s not perfect, but it’s authentic and it’s a real tree that you find in the forests of Quebec,” Mr. Pelletier said. “We’re not pretending this is the most amazing, beautiful tree in the world.”

And so Montreal was blessed with the biggest Christmas tree sponsored by the Grandest Civic Jackasses in Canada. Perhap, as in Charlie Brown's Christmas, the people of Montreal will learn to love it. Don't hold your breath.