Community's Generosity Overwhelms North Pole Airport Family

NEW CITY, NY — The Cirlin family puts on their annual holiday lights-and-music show out of love.

They love inventing the designs and building the displays. They love making the visitors happy. They love helping deserving charities that help others.

This year, they even enjoyed figuring out how to keep visitors safe by making the event pandemic-proof (even the elves in the elf traffic control tower were masked).

Now, as the holiday season has ended, they find themselves overwhelmed.

They asked for donations — money for Angel Flight North East, a non-profit, tax exempt 501(c) charitable organization that provides free air transportation so that children and adults may access life saving medical care, and food for People to People of Rockland, the county's largest food pantry.

The response was overwhelmingly generous: more than $25,000 for Angel Flight and more than 3,000 pounds of food for P2P. "We are just blown away," Gary Cirlin told Patch.

Cirlin had been worried about Angel Flight.

"They have had an incredibly tough year," Cirlin told Patch as the Christmas season began. Angel Flight has airline partners who provide free seats, but since many of the patients could not fly commercial, the private pilot volunteers picked up the slack. "These miraculous hero pilots will fly three-four flights to take a patient here to there," Cirlin said. "We need to help them."

As it turns out, all the money lovingly donated this year by the North Pole Airport's visitors and supporters will pay for 84 Angel Flights. "That’s up from 45 last year," Cirlin said.

Two local business owners helped the amount climb by offering to match a day's donations. He thanked Linda Fernandez, a real estate agent, who matched one Sunday's donations for $1,500 and the owner of Duke of Oil in New City, who matched a Saturday's donations for $4,000.

"Amazing community members," Cirlin said.

Patch has teamed with Feeding America to help raise awareness on behalf of the millions of Americans facing hunger. Feeding America, which supports 200 food banks across the country, estimates that in 2020, more than 50 million Americans will not have enough nutritious food to eat due to the effects of the coronavirus pandemic. This is a Patch social good project; Feeding America receives 100 percent of donations. Find out how you can donate in your community or find a food pantry near you.