Advice on removing a subject from an image

Hi all!

Relativley new photoshop user here. I'm trying to edit the photo linked below and essentially replace whats in the snowglobe (it's not a snowglobe but since I'm not sure what it's called I'll just call it that for simplicity's sake). I found a few good tutorials on actually putting the new subject in, but I'm a bit lost on taking what's in there already, out. It's kinda tricky since it's not a uniform color, I tried to brush over it (and first selecting it with the pen tool), but I had too many colors, and even trying to blend them with the mixing brush didn't work so well (could be I also didn't utalize the correct technique). I also tried to use the content aware fill, which ended up a bit better but still not desirable. I guess it doesn't need to be perfect since I'm putting something else there, but I wasn't even able to achieve something "ok".

I hope this is the right place to ask this, if not I'll take a pointer to a better place to go.

Thanks!