Christmas toys for everyone in need on Hilton Head, and the lasting gift from a giver

It’s supposed to be a Santa Shop, and it certainly is that.

But the bustling scene of red and green, with “elves” aflutter stocking shelves with stuffed animals, toy trucks, books and bicycles, and even some pretty far out lava lamps, tells the story of Hilton Head Island — and whether it has been naughty or nice.

The Deep Well Project, the island’s primary nonprofit social services agency, has been distributing Christmas toys to families in need for decades.

But this Christmas, it took 100 volunteers to organize and run a Santa Shop on steroids.

Agency Director Sandy Gillis said it “went viral” in 2020, the year the coronavirus tried to snuff out Christmas, but failed miserably.

“The pandemic started in March and by December all these people had been trapped in their houses and couldn’t go see grandchildren, and grandchildren couldn’t come see them, so they started ordering on Amazon and the whole island became their family,” Gillis said.

The Santa Shop unwraps the inner child, apparently, with retirees hoping their passions will ignite a new and much different generation.

Book club members donate books.

A charter boat captain donated 40 kids’ fishing kits.

Choral Society patrons brought musical toys for Deep Well at their Christmas performance.

Motorcycle clubbers roared in wearing heavy boots and chains to deliver sparkling toys that volunteers sorted.

It’s a good thing all these Santas come to what was in effect a community Christmas tree — and, yes, someone delivered a slightly used Christmas tree to be given away as they left town last week.

It’s a good thing because Hilton Head’s working class is hurting.

Deep Well has twice the demand for food this year over last year.

Maybe that’s why moms, some in tears, came to choose perfect gifts in the back room at Deep Well, filling bags with donated toys and clothes.

Maybe that’s why one woman came straight from chemotherapy to pick up toys for the grandchildren she is raising.

Their children and grandchildren — a record total this year of 800 kids — will have a Christmas after all.

“It’s Hilton Head’s Santa Shop,” Gillis said. “It really is. We just house it and organize it.”

VASSAR PROFESSOR

Santa would surely like the fact that “inflation did not diminish the giving,” as veteran “elf” Pat Kenworthy put it.

She’s more valuable to the operation than, say, Rudolph because she speaks Spanish and a good 60% of the clients are Hispanic.

Before tracking the bicycle donations for 10 years on a spreadsheet, before putting her PhD to work organizing a wall of books, Kenworthy was for 30 years a Spanish professor at Vassar College.

Now she speaks the language of 20-inch and 28-inch bicycles — 140 of them given away this year at Deep Well.

The Bike Santa is an island real estate agent.

Jeff Hunt donated 300 bicycles this Christmas — 100 for Deep Well, 100 to a Boys & Girls Club and 100 for children in Jasper County.

Actually, others, led by his colleague Mark Lynch at Dunes Real Estate, helped by raising $10,000, which paid for 80 of the bikes and 300 helmets.

Hunt said he had loving parents, but they didn’t have much when he was growing up, his dad moving constantly for construction work and Hunt putting together his own first bike from parts in a junkyard behind their trailer park.

“It enabled me to have freedom,” he said. “I could go places. I could see things. I could be with my friends who lived farther away. It opens up your world.”

SEARS TOUGHSKINS

Last year, Hunt was ranked the sixth most-successful real estate agent of some 30,000 working the trade in South Carolina.

Over the past two years he sold almost 200 properties worth more than $100 million. This year, he did about 75 transactions, worth some $68 million.

His life would not be the same, he said, without an uncle who loaned him $500 to go to aviation school, or the school administrator who let him stay when he couldn’t pay his bill on time.

And then there was his junior high teacher, Mr. Johnson.

“I was acting up in class one day back in the back, talking, and he threw an eraser at me, and I caught it and jumped up and threw it back at him and hollered, ‘He’s safe’ or something like that, something smart-ass, that kind of thing.

“And he said, ‘Go out in the hall.’ I go out in the hall and of course they call my mom, and my mom comes and while we’re out there, he tells my mom, he says, ‘One day you’re going to be very proud of this young man, and today is not that day.’

“And that really stuck with me. That one little comment, in junior high. That someday, somebody would be proud of something I did. I couldn’t have gotten to where I am today without going through all of that.”

Christmas when Hunt was a kid never involved a new bike.

It was usually one toy and some clothes, like Toughskins jeans from Sears “that were literally like wearing cardboard when you first got them,” he said.

He hopes the Christmas bikes can open new worlds for Lowcountry kids, and give hard-working parents a boost.

But there’s more to it than that.

“The most influential people in your life are the people who did something for you very subtly,” Hunt said. “It’s not the person who bought you a car or something like that, it’s the kind word and the belief in you.

“The message should be: Everybody needs something. I don’t care who you are. I don’t care how much money you have, how much time you have, how old you are. Everybody needs help at some point in their life.

“If people would just open the door for somebody else, or say a kind word, and then hope that they do it, too.”

David Lauderdale may be reached at LauderdaleColumn@gmail.com.