Leave it to my crazy state!

South Carolina has screwed up its own Christmas tree.

The tree is being heavily criticized because the bottom of it looks terrible. It’s missing limbs and is shockingly bare. One passerby said it looked like Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree, referring to the ageless Peanuts special in which Charlie Brown buys the saddest excuse for a “tree” he could find — barely an upright branch — because he feels sorry for it.

It looks the best on one side, and fortunately that side is facing Main Street. But the sides and the back of the tree look like it’s suffering from some kind of botanical disease.

The Columbia Garden Club this year decided to go for a “better deal.” Rather than going to the North Carolina tree grower it used last year, it went all the way to Pennsylvania for a cheaper and shorter tree.

That’s going quite a long way to make a point.

Finding a suitable tree, even a tree that would have done the Keystone State proud, wasn’t the problem. But the grower bundled it for shipment, according to reports, the same way he bundles smaller trees: with lots of netting. This netting broke off lower branches, leading to the complaints.

Back in 2004, a different variety of tree was used because the organizers wanted a South Carolina-grown tree. Its branches grew upward, not outward, and when workers cut lower branches to position it into the ground, the bottom of that tree looked sparse, too.

So the garden club brought in an army of smaller trees and placed them around the base of the big tree to make it look…well…bushier.

They’ll likely have to do that again this year.

Maybe it will help them remember this basic truth: you get what you pay for!