Jeremy Morris, an Idaho attorney people started calling the “Christmas Lawyer,” spent nearly eight years suing his own homeowners association over holiday lights, pushed the fight all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, and settled for significantly more than the $75,000 a jury originally awarded him. He did not bank the money or quietly move on with his life — he bought more Christmas lights. This year’s display is bigger than the one that started the entire fight, and by his own account, it’s funded with money that once sat in the HOA’s legal budget. A dispute that began over a few strands of lights on a suburban lawn ended up in front of the nation’s highest court, and Morris is still decorating.
A charity light show a board letter called a problem
Morris’s holiday production began in 2014 at an earlier home, where he built a five-night event featuring roughly 700,000 lights, a live nativity scene, carolers, and a camel, raising money for children with cancer. When he and his wife, Kristy, bought a house in the West Hayden Estates subdivision near Hayden, Idaho, in 2015 and told the board they planned to keep hosting it, the board’s objection is preserved in the court record. A January 2015 letter to the couple raised concerns that the event could upset “non-Christian” neighbors and draw “riff-raff” into the community, according to the Ninth Circuit’s own account of the case. Board members discussed possible litigation before the Morrises had even closed on the house.
A jury win, a reversal, and a trip to the Supreme Court
Morris sued in federal court in January 2017, arguing the HOA’s opposition amounted to religious discrimination and unlawful interference under the Fair Housing Act. A jury sided with him in 2018 and awarded $75,000. U.S. District Judge B. Lynn Winmill then set that verdict aside, ordered Morris to cover roughly $111,000 of the HOA’s legal fees, and barred him from repeating the display. It took until June 2024 for the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to partly revive his case, ruling that a jury could still find the board’s letter to be evidence of unlawful interference and sending that claim back for a new trial. Morris then petitioned the Supreme Court to take up the rest of the dispute. The justices denied that petition in January 2025, which wasn’t a ruling in his favor, but it did clear the way for the retrial the HOA had spent years trying to avoid.
Facing a retrial, the HOA finally settled
Rather than go through a second trial, West Hayden Estates First Addition Homeowners Association settled with Morris in December 2025. Neither side disclosed the dollar figure, though Morris has indicated the payout landed well above the original $75,000 verdict, and that the association’s own legal bill, run up over nearly a decade of fighting him, topped $1 million. He marked the news the way he’d litigated the case: in public. On his Facebook page on December 24, he wrote that “the evil done by the federal judge has been undone, and our family’s right to celebrate Christmas through this ministry has been vindicated.”
Spending it on exactly what started the fight
What came next surprised nobody who’d followed the case. The court order that once barred Morris from decorating had already lapsed, and reporters who checked in with him after the settlement found him buying up lights, yard inflatables, and trees for a display built to outdo the one his old neighborhood spent years trying to shut down. His plans for this season reportedly include 14 Christmas trees and an indoor winter wonderland, according to the American Bar Association’s ABA Journal. The HOA board that spent a decade fighting to keep that display off Morris’s lawn no longer has any legal standing to stop it.
Strip away the nickname and the spite-spending headline, and what’s left is a genuinely unusual property-rights case: an HOA covenant fight that produced a jury verdict, a reversal, a circuit court opinion, and a real petition docketed at the Supreme Court, all over string lights and a nativity scene. Most neighbor disputes over holiday decorations end with a strongly worded letter or a quiet compliance. This one produced a federal case file thick enough to bill a million dollars against, and a homeowner who took the settlement check and used it to do the exact thing the lawsuit was about in the first place.
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