SAM Magazine—Londonderry, Vt., Mar. 3, 2022—Magic Mountain will donate $10 of every lift ticket for the coming weekend to the Save the Children Crisis Relief Fund for Ukraine, resort president Geoff Hatheway said in the area’s Alpine Update on Wednesday. According to Hatheway, the fund was chosen as it has already been active in the previously strife-torn Donetsk region of Ukraine and is now working to support children and families being targeted in Kharkiv, Kyiv, and others forced to flee the violence in Western Ukraine. 

Magic will also place donation boxes at several locations around the resort, and plans to match all donations that come in through those outlets as well.

The fundraising drive came about after Magic posted a video on Twitter of Stoli brand vodka being dumped down the drain at its Tavern establishment, and the post went viral. "The symbolism of the most well-known Russian brand in the world being dumped and unwelcome at the Tavern because of Putin's war hit a chord with people wanting to support Ukraine,” Hatheway said.

Hatheway acknowledged that "the old Soviet-era, Russian-branded Stoli vodka, meaning ‘Capital City’ with its 1940s Moscow hotel still on its label, is now filtered, bottled, and exported from Latvia." However, he added, "its grain is from and distilled in the Tambov region of Russia by Stoli, and deliberately sold with success here and elsewhere by still using that same Soviet-era/Russian branding to this day. And it won't be staring at us on the Tavern shelves while this war continues."

Hatheway noted that support through symbolism would not be enough to make a difference in the war-torn country.

“It's more important now that we try to do something tangible rather than merely symbolic, even if small, to help the Ukrainian people in their time of immense courage, injury, and terror. We can’t do everything all the time, but we can do something at certain critical historical times, even if we are just a small ski area in Vermont. This is one of those times,” he said.

Hatheway concluded his post by saying, “Thank you in advance for considering a gift as we can always accomplish more, with greater impact, as a community rather than alone.”