July 5, 2013

What happens in Mexico...

For the May/June Challenge, members of the Plush Team were asked to create plush pieces that illustrated a vacation nightmare. At first, I had NO idea what to make, and then I started thinking back to my family vacations, and volia! I had my idea.

These plush are based on a true event that happened to my family as we were playing poolside on Christmas morning, 1982 in CanCun, Mexico.

My sister (4yrs old) and I (8yrs old) watched in horror, alongside a bunch of other families next to the pool as a group of "orderlies" headed up by a truly ugly "Nurse" (on closer inspection we realized that the "she" was actually a "he" in full drag, with seriously hairy legs and stubble and chest hair) carried on a stretcher a sprawled out Santa towards the edge of the pool. 



Santa seemed to be drinking blood (THE HORROR!) out of an IV Bag on the stretcher. All the orderlies and the nurse were laughing their butts off, and were clearly drunk themselves. 


Without any warning, the orderlies heaved Santa into the pool, and then they all jumped in after him. Needless to say, my sister was HORRIFIED that they'd tried to drown Santa, and it took my parents a loooooong time to calm her down enough to where she could listen and understand that it was someone else dressed in a very tight and too-small Santa suit pretending to be Santa, and that he wasn't drinking actual blood, it was an alcoholic drink called a Bloody Mary. 

I will spare you all the visual of what the tight, white uniformed "nurse" looked like getting out of the pool, but I did make sure to add on to my Santa plush the butt-crack that we all saw as he was helped out of the pool:



You can imagine how many complaints the hotel management got from all the other parents with small children who were traumatized that morning by seeing this crazy stunt. 0_o  
We got over the shock and enjoyed the rest of our vacation; had some great times and saw some amazing things that trip, so it all balanced out in the end. :) 

If you'd like to see the other entries into the Plush Team's Vacation Nightmare Challenge, you can find them in the Plush Team's etsy shop. There are some great plush by the Raggy Rat and KittyKitty Crafts depicting their own ideas of vacation nightmares.