Hunter S. Thompson was an unconventional man to say the least, but he still liked to celebrate the holidays by putting up a Christmas tree just like an average Joe.
However, Hunter disposed of his tree in a way many of us wish we could but few would dare to attempt- by incinerating it in a post-holiday blaze of glory in his fireplace.
Hunter demonstrated his Christmas tree disposal technique to TIME magazine writer Sam Allis when Sam visited Hunter's Colorado home in 1990, telling his secretary Deborah Fuller:
"Let’s give the journalist a memorable experience to write about. He needs to learn how to burn the creosote out of a chimney. We can’t run the risk of a chimney fire during the year.”
Sam had this to say about the day he witnessed Hunter's version of Christmas cheer:
“I gave up on the interview and started worrying about my life when Hunter Thompson squirted two cans of fire starter on the Christmas tree he was going to burn in his living-room fireplace, a few feet away from an unopened wooden crate of 9-mm bullets. That the tree was far too large to fit into the fireplace mattered not a whit to Hunter, who was sporting a dime-store wig at the time and resembled Tony Perkins in Psycho. Minutes earlier, he had smashed a Polaroid camera on the floor.”
Hunter had decided to videotape the Christmas tree burning, and we later heard on the replay the terrified voices of Deborah Fuller, his longtime secretary-baby sitter, and me off-camera pleading with him, “NO, HUNTER, NO! PLEASE, HUNTER, DON’T DO IT!” The original manuscript of Hell’s Angels was on the table, and there were the bullets. Nothing doing. Thompson was a man possessed by now, full of the Chivas Regal he had been slurping straight from the bottle and the gin he had been mixing with pink lemonade for hours.
Read more about Fear & Loathing at Christmas at Dangerous Minds