This entire Bill Murray interview with Esquire is pretty great, but the part about the holiday parties he throws is particularly great…
BM: I do. I throw a Christmas party at my house. It’s not really a Christmas party, because I don’t want to call it a Christmas party. But let’s just say I put a lot of Christmas trees around the house, so it smells good. I used to serve Christmas wine — a sort of Beaujolais Nouveau — because you could leave it outdoors and it feels right for the season. I’d serve it, and people would just end up at the bar in my house, drinking anything else they could find there. My friends said the party needs a higher octane. They needed something more danceable. Beaujolais doesn’t make people dance. So I said to my friend Peter Kelly [co-founder of Slovenia Vodka], a great chef — his restaurants are fantastic, I’ve been eating in them for thirty years. Have you ever had his food?
ESQ: No, but he gave me a recipe for lobster made with vodka, and it sounds pretty good.
BM: Oh, that one is great. That’s really great. He makes the food at this non-Christmas party of mine. I said I should get vodka, and he said, “I’ve got something.” It was this Slovenia Vodka. At that point you couldn’t buy it — it was only known to a couple of people. See, what I wanted was one of those ice luges. It’s a big magilla to get an ice luge, but if you do, you can pour vodka into it and it chills it on the way down. It looks like an Olympic ski jump. It’s more for visual effect. You can put your head underneath it, like you’re guzzling gasoline, but we just fill shot glasses. Hundreds of little shot glasses. So, we drank this stuff, and it took the party to a completely other level. The party lasted much longer. No one left. The year before, people would leave at, like, two or three in the morning. With the vodka luge, they didn’t leave until five. The last two years I’ve had this luge. That’s how I like to drink. Out of a large ice structure.
I desperately hope to someday get invited to a holiday party at Bill Murray’s house.