BAA HUMBUG: Nicola Quinn with the sex toy her seven-year-old daughter won at the Tahunanui Arts and Crafts Fair.

A Nelson family are shocked that a market stall is giving away sex toys as prizes, after their young daughter won a blow-up sheep at the Tahunanui Arts and Crafts Fair on Sunday.

The girl's grandfather, Allan Goodman, her mother, Nicola Quinn, and grandmother, Angela Quinn, were stunned when their seven-year-old appeared in the lounge yesterday morning, holding her prize. She had won it from Sturgeon Amusements, a market stall at the fair.

The sheep, sporting a French maid's bonnet and with beguiling long-lashed blue eyes, was "disgusting", Angela Quinn said. She was "mortified" that her granddaughter had been walking around the fair with it all day, and promptly confiscated it.

"When she walked in here with it I thought, 'What the hell?' I was mortified. I can't believe they'd give that away as prizes. Not to a little kid."

She said the stall was directly aimed at children and she was shocked a sex toy could be given away as a prize – especially as it was already inflated and on display, revealing its working parts.

"You can't tell me they didn't blow that up and see what it was," she said.

Nicola Quinn said she'd seen other children with the sheep at the fair as well, and thefamily hadn't realised quite what it was designed for when her daughter won it. The girl now wanted it back, but she said she was going to have to buy her something more family-friendly. "We'll have to tell her the dog mauled it."

"Kids are growing up too fast as it is," Mr Goodman said. "You have to be 18 to get into a sex shop to buy that stuff and here they are giving them away to little kids.

"They shouldn't have been selling that stuff at a family day out."

George Sturgeon, who owns Sturgeon Amusements, said using the sheep as children's prizes was a mistake. The sheep had been included by his 78-year-old father, who ran the stall. "They were meant to have been burned years ago," he said. "I'll deal with it. That won't happen again."

Mr Sturgeon offered the family a replacement prize if they returned the sheep to the stall.