Last year, I wrote a piece looking back on Montreal's brief fling with having an infamously ugly Christmas tree, and its lost potential as an annual tradition. The original 2016 disaster that got us globally roasted for a scraggly fir that looked like it had survived a breakup spawned hashtags and social media accounts. It was, reasonably speaking, beloved and hated.
The argument was simple: other cities chase perfection, and Montreal should chase personality. The ugly tree or sapin laid held up a mirror to the character of our city; both are messy, self-aware, and unapologetically imperfect.
But I couldn't let it go.
After I wrote that piece, I watched the city put up perfectly adequate holiday displays that could belong to literally anywhere: Fine trees, nice lights, zero personality. I thought about what we had for those two brief years—2016's accidental disaster and 2017's deliberate embrace of it with the Village du Vilain Sapin—and how we just stopped.
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