GROW. RISE. TOGETHER.
“We would tow this huge trailer decked out in lights and with a tree on it to a couple of different neighborhoods where we knew it wouldn’t be an issue,” Bittner said. “And then we went to a school that was closed at night [so] we’d have this big, giant open lot. We went to another community down the road where there was a VFW [Veterans of Foreign Wars].” The first year they played four stops. Bittner’s friend, Joe Popow, whom he called “the most au- thentic Santa you’ve ever seen in your life” accompanied them. He also recruited his youngest of two daughters, Alyssa, who dressed as an elf and handed out candy canes to children and walked around with a bucket to collect money from concertgoers. People in the local communities, including some of his co-workers, “bring their kids, kids go see San- ta,” Bittner said. “They listen to us, give us a couple of bucks, and we would get it to the right people when all this was over.” Within a week or so, the band and Santa visited the houses of the selected families and dispersed gift cards and presents. “It kind of grew into this thing where we’d be able to get informa- tion on the families, like how many kids, what are their ages, what are their sizes,” he said, adding that the bandmates’ spouses shop for the kids’ clothes and toys, and then they’d all wrap the items. “It was a huge success,” Bittner said of the 2020 endeavor—so much so “that we had every intention of do- ing it every year.” They had just set out preparing for the 2021 show that October when Bittner went in for routine blood work. “Next thing you know, I’m casing mail in the morning. I get a phone call from the nurse, and she says, ‘Your liver enzymes are through the roof, and we’ve got to figure out why,’ ” the 29-year letter carrier said. “And that just kind of set off this chain of events where I had to get all these different tests.
“It was an ultrasound and then an MRI, and I find out I have this tumor, and they thought I had bile duct cancer initially, and it’s like a death sentence,” he continued, adding that after undergoing a colonoscopy he was eventually correctly diagnosed with Stage IV colorectal cancer. “I’m reading, and I’m thinking, ‘Oh my God, how did I go from perfectly healthy a month ago to, man, I might have three or five years?’ You know, that starts all setting in.” His eldest daughter, Haley, was getting married that December, and Bittner was convinced by a friend to get his minister’s license to officiate the ceremony, so he did. “She’ll always have this to remember—that her dad married her,” he said. “Around the same time, we’re doing Year 2 of the Christmas gig. And it’s just under this shroud of uncertainty and fear and what’s going to happen next. I know that chemo is coming, and I just kept thinking, ‘Boy, I hope it doesn’t start until after the Christmas gig,’ ” he added. “I didn’t want to let my bandmates down. I didn’t want to let the people down that were go- ing to be on the receiving end of these gifts.” Fortunately, he was able to fully participate in the annual festivi- ties. “It was even a bigger suc- cess than the first year. More people turned out, more money was raised, more families were helped,” Bittner said. They started to mix up the format, adding in some regular rock music, too. They continued to collect cash, sometimes gift cards, and also PayPal donations at each stop. Af- ter receiving help from the retired prosecutor the first year with se- lecting families, the band was able to start finding them on their own. “People started hearing we were doing this, and we’d have people come to [us and] say, ‘Hey, man, I know this family, and they just had a house fire and lost everything. Can you help them out?’ ” he said.
The Postal Record 61 August 2024 Being involved with music is both fun and rewarding, Bittner said. “Playing in the band has been so invaluable to me during my can- cer journey, because every minute I spend learning a song, playing “We’ll check into it and be, like, ‘OK, this is legit. Let’s help these people out.’ ” One of his favorite memories from the endeavor was when he and the band was playing a gig in the fall, and he saw a man he recognized but couldn’t place. In between sets, the man approached the band and said they had helped him and his family out the first year when they were in a tough spot. He had then gotten a new job and was doing better, so he wanted to offer a donation for another family in need. “That was really cool, because that was like, we’ve made a difference in these people’s lives, and now they’re ap- preciative, and they’re here to sup- port us as a band—but more impor- tantly, they’re here to pay it forward and give it to somebody else who’s now down on their luck.” Bittner began chemotherapy in January 2022 and tried working his postal job through his treatment to keep a sense of normalcy, but he ended up taking some time off here and there for treatments, which in- cluded eight chemo infusions, fol- lowed by five radiation treatments, and then a major surgery in which surgeons removed 60 percent of his liver and a section of his colon. In addition, “I had my gallbladder removed, hernia repaired, and I ended up with an ileostomy bag for nine weeks,” he said. “They sent me [for] a scan in De- cember of last year, and they found a tiny little piece of cancer in my common bile duct,” he continued. “And there again, the first thing I’m thinking is, ‘I don’t know when surgery is going to be, but I hope I can get this Christmas gig in,’ and I find out the surgery is going to be February. We did Christmas show No. 3 last December. And again— bigger, better, more money, more families.”
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