Jimmy Fallon Roasted This Ontario Town's Christmas Tree Lighting & It's So Cringe (VIDEO)
"That's it?"
Orillia's town Christmas tree. Right: Jimmy Fallon on the Tonight Show.
Late-night TV hosts love to poke fun at small-town Canada, and one Ontario town just gave Jimmy Fallon a not-so-perfectly-wrapped Christmas present with its festive tree-lighting fail.
Orillia, Ontario kicked off the holiday season with a traditional tree-lighting event on November 17, and videos from the big moment shows it was a pretty underwhelming affair.
In one popular video, dozens of people look on as the big moment comes and a switch is thrown to light up a giant tree — only it doesn’t fully light up. Instead, the tree only has Christmas lights wrapped around its trunk, whereas the branches are bare.
The result is more of a Christmas trunk than a Christmas tree, and you can definitely hear the disappointment in the crowd.
“That’s it? What the hell?” one of the onlookers can be heard saying, amid more grumbling from the crowd.
Fallon shared the clip during his monologue on The Tonight Show this week and had a good laugh at the Canadian town’s expense.
“You know you’ve messed up when you get a Canadian mad enough to say ‘hell,’” he said.
The incident has sparked plenty of shame and mockery online over the last week, even before Fallon got to it.
“That collective disappointment was deafening,” wrote one X user.
“Some serious budget cuts here,” quipped another, while several more users joked about it being an inflation tree. Many more compared it to the Festivus pole from Seinfeld or the lame Christmas tree from Charlie Brown.
@sonicmoreretro The large tree in the centre of @Downtown Orillia #Orillia gets lit up every Christmas... this year they redid the lights, and let's just say... it's not good. ..... #fyp #canada #santaclause #Christmas #christmastree #thegrinch #christmaslights #seinfeld #festivus #pole #funny #joke
So WTF happened?
City official Mike Ladouceur told local paper OrilliaMatters that the lacklustre display was due to concerns about damaging the old tree and potentially putting locals at risk. They said arborists and the lighting contractor were worried about the branches collapsing, and so they opted to wrap lights around the trunk instead.
“Given the event had already been planned and advertised by the Downtown Orillia BIA, staff worked with the Orillia Downtown BIA and contractors to find an alternative option. The decision was made to focus on lighting the trunk as a compromise to preserve the festive spirit of the event," said Ladouceur, who is the city’s director of business development, tourism and modernization.
Community organizer Leslie Fournier acknowledged the "quirky and odd" results in a lengthy Facebook post, and admitted that organizers could've done better than the "disappointing" results.
“The hope was that the trunk would provide back lighting for the branches and it would look festive in an untraditional way. Well, we can all see now that the overall effect is underwhelming,” she wrote on Facebook. However, she added that the overall event was still a hit and that the “Christmas Trunk” will be a fun story to tell for years to come.
"Things don’t always go as expected AND we can still find some magic in all of it," she wrote.