'Christmas Lawyer' who went to war with HOA spends windfall on holiday cheer
The "Christmas Lawyer" was facing the possibility of owing a huge amount of money over a lawsuit that he previously won over a festive Christmas display that was also helping raise money for childhood cancer. The Supreme Court kicked the case to the appellate court. Then everything turned around.
Idaho lawyer Jeremy Morris spoke to Fox News Digital about his staged elaborate holiday displays in defiance of his former homeowners association that led to a protracted legal battle.
The case was overturned by the judge after he was previously awarded $75,000 in 2019. He then appealed to the 9th Circuit in 2020, before his saga got all the way to the Supreme Court. When the case reached SCOTUS, it was kicked back to the appellate court and the HOA reached a settlement, leaving Moore triumphant.
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"They (HOA) ended up paying us significantly more, ironically, than the jury awarded us many years ago. The jury previously awarded us $75,000 (in 2019), and I will tell you that we actually settled for significantly more than $75,000," Morris said.
Instead of going through another trial, there was a mediation because the HOA realized Morris would keep appealing. According to Morris, the HOA, which he calls "grinches," "undoubtedly paid over a million in attorney fees to overturn the $75,000 verdict" over the years, resulting in paying Morris more than the jury awarded him.
What is Morris doing with the money? Spreading even more Christmas cheer and not letting any grinches stop it.
"Well, I can tell you that I'm buying a lot of Christmas lights, and I'm enjoying it every time that I screw in a light bulb. I think of my HOA and their effort to shut down Christmas," he said.
This all began in 2014, when thousands of people showed up to his house to celebrate Christmas and raise money for kids with cancer. In 2014, he repaired an antique cotton candy machine he'd inherited from his grandfather and made it the centerpiece of his Christmas display. He created a Facebook event and was shocked when hundreds of families showed up to look at lights, sip hot chocolate and meet Santa Claus.
"Not long after that, unfortunately, our family found ourselves at the center of a national, actually international, controversy that went all the way up to the United States Supreme Court," he said.
In 2015, he decided that the celebration had to be even bigger. The family found what they called their "dream house" just outside the city of Hayden in Kootenai County and put in an offer on New Year's Eve.
Morris immediately called the president of the neighborhood homeowners association to give it a heads-up about his planned display for the following Christmas.
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"I reached out to the HOA and just said, 'Hey, look, we're going to do this thing. Maybe you have some ideas. I'm thinking maybe doing shuttles because there aren't sidewalks. What do you think?'" Morris said. "In a very cordial way."
In response to Morris' plans, one West Hayden Estates homeowners association board member drafted a letter that pondered whether neighborhood "atheists" might be offended by the display and worried about "riff-raff" that might be drawn to the neighborhood, noting that the Morris family previously lived near a Walmart.
Morris started decorating his house with around 700,000 lights months before Christmas. Then the HOA's lawyer demanded he remove them within 10 days. Morris refused.
And despite the threat of a lawsuit, the show went on, complete with a live nativity scene, carolers and even a camel. Hired shuttle buses dropped off thousands of revelers — with some families coming from Washington and Canada — over the course of the five-evening event, which raised funds for children's charities.
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Morris said his family received threats, including an in-person confrontation partially caught on camera in which a neighbor offered to "take care of him."
Morris said he never wanted to take legal action and offered to waive his rights to proceed with a lawsuit if the HOA agreed to leave his family alone. The HOA refused, he said, and the statute of limitations was almost up.
So in January 2017, two years after receiving the first letter from the HOA, he sued, alleging religious discrimination in violation of the Fair Housing Act.
The jury returned a unanimous decision in his favor and ordered the HOA to pay $75,000.
But the story didn't end there. In a twist, a federal judge reversed the jury's verdict and ordered Morris to pay the HOA's legal fees, to the tune of $111,000.
Judge B. Lynn Winmill concluded the case wasn't about religious discrimination, but rather the Morris family's violation of neighborhood rules. Morris failed to provide facts that there was a "legally sufficient basis upon which a reasonable jury" could conclude the HOA violated the Fair Housing Act, Winmill wrote.
Additionally, the judge's order permanently banned the family from hosting another Christmas program that violated the HOA rules.
His case went before the 9th Circuit in June 2020 and waited four years for a ruling.
A three-judge panel affirmed Winmill's overturning of the jury verdict, concluding that a reasonable jury should not have found the HOA letter from 2015 indicated a preference that a "non-religious individual" buy the Morris' home.
The 9th Circuit ruling allowed for a new trial, but Morris appealed to the Supreme Court instead.
"The right to celebrate Christmas in accordance with our family’s faith traditions, to use our property to express that Christian faith tradition, and the right to have a unanimous jury verdict protected after 15 hours of deliberations — all are at the core of Constitutional protections and 250 years of American jurisprudence," he wrote.
Around 349,000 Idahoans live in neighborhoods governed by HOAs, just under 20% of the state's total population, according to 2021 data from the Foundation for Community Association Research.
Morris told Fox News Digital that his family still owns his home in Idaho but, "we were forced to quietly leave and go east due to death threats."
"After talking to my children and supporters from around the globe — and they have encouraged me to use some of the HOAs money to host an even bigger Christmas show, and in a neighborhood that embraces Christmas. I would never again try to spread Christmas cheer to hateful people. They don’t deserve my Christmas fun. But I’ll be doing it with their money. #winning," said Morris.
Additionally, Morris said, "The evil done by the federal judge has been undone and our family’s right to celebrate Christmas through this ministry has been vindicated. As this court order against us was only just lifted after 6 years, we focused on decorating with 14 Christmas trees and an indoor winter wonderland. But our children’s wait to see camels and choirs in our yard again is not long in coming!"
Representatives for the West Hayden estates homeowners association did not return Fox News Digital's request for comment.
Fox News' Hannah Ray Lambert contributed to this report.