Toys gathered at Brick House on Butler’s Main Street
Kicking off the holiday season with a bang is something that Chuck Swidzinski and his team at Berkshire Hathaway have been doing for Butler County families for the past 11 years.
On Thursday, Dec. 1 at The Brick House on Butler’s Main St., Swidzinski and associates hosted their 11th Toys for Tots Gift Drive from 5 to 9 p.m.
The event featured a buffet, cash bar, raffles such as ‘Stock the Bar’ where the winner took home multiple bottles of different alcohol, a DJ, a photo booth with a professional photographer and multiple backdrops for Christmas photos, and featured visits from Santa Claus, the Grinch and the U.S. Marines.
The event was free to the public, as long as they came with a new unwrapped toy to donate and place under the Christmas tree.
The drive also accepted monetary donations to purchase even more toys in the days after the event.
“My assistant Jared Sullivan came up with [the idea],” Swidzinski, of Center Township, said. “The first year I think we got 100-and-some toys, and now we get over 1,000 toys [and] sometimes up to 2,000 toys.”
As years passed by, the Toys for Tots Gift Drive grew larger and larger and allowed even more gifts to be given to Butler Country children each holiday season.
“We’ve promoted it much more now, and everybody has always been so gracious as to give and show up for the event,” Swidzinski said. “It’s funny, because you run into people and they’ll be like, ‘We’ll be at your Toys for Tots event!’ and that’s a nice feeling. You’re coming out of a grocery store and someone tells you that you’ve done a great thing and that’s what we wanted to do, we wanted to give back to Butler.”
Alongside Swidzinski’s team, the Marines came and participated in collecting and distributing the gifts during the drive and in the days after. During the last few Christmases, gifts have been handed out at the Clearview Mall.
“It’s a big event, people look forward to it, [and] a lot of people tell me it really starts off the Christmas season for them,” Swidzinski said. “It’s a way for my team members and I to give back to the community.”
In addition to the Marines, the local Department of Veteran’s Affairs worked with Toys for Tots to keep disabled veterans involved in their community during the holiday season.
Working with Mary Ann Capuzzi and the VA, Swidzinski picked up toys a few hours before the main event from disabled veterans. Throughout the year, these veterans get ‘canteen bucks’ where they can buy items from the canteen and some buy toys to be donated to Toys for Tots.
“We go out there before the event, about two in the afternoon that day, and we pick up the toys from the veterans,” Swidzinski said. “They collect toys and then we go out and take pictures with them, and then we take the toys to our event to be put under the tree. These guys look forward to that, they save their money and buy toys at the canteen for the kids. We [enjoy] having the veterans involved and the Marines involved, we like it to be a community thing.”
In recent weeks, Swidzinski had been hopeful that last year’s turnout returns and COVID-19 wouldn’t impact the event as it did in 2020.
“We were really concerned about last year, we didn’t know how it was going to be,” Swidzinski said. “We were slammed last year, and I think that was probably because it was our 10th year for the event. I think we had over 1,000 people last year.”
In addition to Swidzinski, his team from Berkshire Hathaway, the Marines and the local VA, local companies sponsor the toy drive, such as law firms, mortgage companies and settlement companies coming together to keep this large event going.
During the season of giving, that is just the thing Swidzinski and his team plan to do.
“It’s very heartwarming at the end of the night when you watch the Marines carry out all of the things to the needy children of our county, all the people all coming together to support our county,” Swidzinski said.
