Christmas an annual homecoming for Penn School's Hilton Head students

For the few Hilton Head Islanders who attended the historical Penn School, Christmas began with a boat ride from Beaufort.

Now an hour-long car ride, the journey from St. Helena Island to Hilton Head used to be so involved, and the school so strict, that students who boarded there would go home just once a year. Each Christmas, they would board a huge boat in Beaufort, dock at Jenkins Island and drive home along dirt roads to spend a week celebrating the holiday by lamp light.

In years past, 87-year-old Charlie Simmons Jr. remembers "Santa" gave him a carpenter's set and cowboy suit with a cap pistol. In years to come, he and his friends would ring in the New Year at the Rip It Up, a Marshland Road juke joint not much bigger than his living room today.

But the first Christmas break from the Penn Normal, Industrial and Agricultural School -- when it was gift enough to just be home -- is still his favorite.

"Those other familiar relatives in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, wherever they were, they came home, too, so we all got together and enjoyed it," Simmons said. "That was the most enjoyable."

During the summer, Penn School students would plant potatoes, broccoli, asparagus and other crops, Simmons said. Over Thanksgiving, which students called "Potato Week," they harvested.

On break for Christmas, Simmons still took to the land, but on his own terms.

He would go searching the woods for small pine trees to decorate with pine cones and Spanish moss in place of ornaments and twinkle lights.

While students had electricity at the Penn School, they were not similarly blessed on Hilton Head until 1950, two years after Simmons graduated from the St. Helena school in its final year.

For entertainment, people would race marsh tackies from house to house.

Mostly, he remembers, the family ate.

His mother, like the other women who lived along Spanish Wells, would cook up macaroni, collard greens and butter beans, plates of barbecue, and a big pot of rice.

"Everybody believed in rice," he said. "I don't care for it too much now."

The men would walk from house to house, visiting for a while and eating their fill, joining the women in carols and then leaving to start the process again.

If a home had a batch of "scrap iron," or moonshine, they might have to carry a guest or two home.

Mostly, they enjoyed each others' company and reveled in the holiday.

While Charles' wife, Rosa, was also in his class, they didn't spent the holidays together. She lived near Penn School and the pair didn't date until years after they graduated and went on to attend different colleges.

As the story goes, Charles Simmons wrote three girls the same letter and only Rosa wrote back.

He and Rosa were married about a year later.

Nowadays, she decorates the home sparingly with an artificial tree covered in multicolor lights and a big, red bow instead of a star. She's also hung a wreath on the front door and lights on the chain-link fence that cuts through the land where Simmons' father used to farm butter beans, squash and watermelon.

But mostly, the home is decorated as it is year-round -- with photos of family and momentos honoring their Gullah roots.

He says his grandchildren wouldn't believe you could celebrate Christmas with even less fan-fare.

"A lot of people don't believe Hilton Head didn't have a bridge," he said. "We didn't have any lights, running water. They didn't believe that."

It's so unlike the flashy, month-long commercial affair Christmas is to many today, Simmons said.

"They just think these things were here all the time," he said of the now-traditional sight of a mountain of presents under a Christmas tree.

Some progress, though, is fine with him.

On Sunday, he sat near the blinking red, green and blue lights in the corner of his living room and recalled the first time he could hang real decorations on a cedar tree.

"Ooh, that was something."

Follow reporter Rebecca Lurye on Twitter at twitter.com/IPBG_Rebecca.

This story was originally published December 21, 2015 at 5:15 PM with the headline "Christmas an annual homecoming for Penn School's Hilton Head students."