10/12/2026
An East Texas newspaper floated an idea nobody could afford, and the money came back from a villa in the south of France that used to belong to Coco Chanel.
The woman who sent it was born Wyn-Nelle Russell in Marshall, Texas, in 1916. She got out early and she got out far. She modelled for Harper's Bazaar and for Vogue, she became Wendy, and she married a man named Emery Reves. In 1953 the two of them bought Villa La Pausa on the French Riviera from Coco Chanel herself, and Winston Churchill came and stayed with them there and painted. By any measure she had left Marshall a long way behind her.
She had not, though. In the late 1980s the Marshall News Messenger ran a piece imagining the whole town strung with lights at Christmas, the courthouse and all. It was the sort of idea a small town reads, likes, and quietly files away. Word of it reached France, and Wendy Reves mailed home a cheque for twenty five thousand dollars, and then kept going, better than a hundred thousand dollars over the next three years.
So the courthouse went up in white lights, and then the square, and then the streets around it, and families started driving in from across East Texas and Louisiana to see a town lit up. They are still coming. It has run every Christmas since.
She gave her great art collection to the Dallas Museum of Art in 1985, and that is the gift her name is usually attached to. But there is a town in Harrison County that glows every December because a girl from there made good and did not forget which way home was.
