Mom’s good intentions wreck Christmas
In an effort to make this Christmas special for her three small children, daughter Daphne and twin sons Ryan and Bryan, Amy Flincher of St. Petersburg has inadvertently ruined the holiday for them.
“This Christmas?? I’m worried they’re going to need therapy for the rest of their lives”, she said, distraught. “I am so bad at this mothering thing.”
“2020 has been really hard on me and the kids and I wanted to do something to make a holiday memory for them”, she said. “We just moved here from Michigan in August and still don’t really know the area very well. But I saw an area labeled ‘Toytown’ on a map and thought, ‘Oh, it must be a Christmas park or something!’. It sounded perfect. We drove over there and found out it was perfect: perfectly awful.”
Toytown is a 240-acre, county-owned parcel near I-275 and Roosevelt Boulevard. It was a landfill operated by the City of St. Petersburg, that opened in the 1960s and served as the county’s primary garbage disposal point into the 1980s.
“Why the fuck would they call it Toytown?!?”, asked Flincher. “The kids were devastated.”
We posed the question to St. Pete Mayor Rick Kriseman who answered, “Beats me. Nobody knows. I’m sure there are probably lots of old busted toys buried out there in the 60′ deep layer of decades-old garbage, along with tons of household trash, construction debris, yard waste and sludge, all rotting away and emitting methane and other toxic gases. Tell her to dig and see what she finds. She can keep anything she comes up with. Merry Christmas and welcome to Pinellas, Flincher family!”
“I knew being a mom would be hard, but never imagined it would be this damn difficult”, she said. “First their rat-bastard father leaves us for some college slut in Ypsilanti and now this.”
She’s trying to remain upbeat, in spite of the string of setbacks. “I’m not giving up. I love my kids”, she said. “I’m going to make it up to them by taking them to that amusement park by the football stadium in Tampa next week, the one with the flying saucer. I drove by the other day and the sign out front said they’re hiring, so maybe I’ll apply for a job while I’m there. It’s not too late to salvage this year and be the kind of mother my kids can admire and respect!”
