Fire and Redemption
This is how summer ends in Santa Fe: in fire and redemption.
It's another one of Santa Fe's odd public rituals: the burning of Old Man Gloom on the Friday before Labor Day. This year will be the 94th burning of this scary effigy -- a burning man decades before there was Burning Man.
Old Man Gloom is called Zozobra. He's a 50 foot tall fully functioning marionette, responsible for all the doom and gloom that happened during the past year.
He is filled with scraps of paper inscribed with a year's worth of misery. People write down their saddest thoughts or bring their divorce papers or other doleful documents and put them inside Zozobra. Then, when he burns up in a giant conflagration, everyone's woes disappear in smoke and flame.
The giant puppet is on display in town for days before the event so that people can visit him and write down their torments and stuff them inside him.
I did last year -- I wrote down what was bothering me, added my scrap to the stuffing inside him, and I felt better when my worst problems were all burned up. A satisfying redemption.
We didn't go to see the actual burning last year, though. It's held at a park north of town and the crowds are huge; over 50,000 attended last year in a town whose population is 70,000. Jim and I are not big on crowds at night, although this is a well managed family event with tight security. This year we're away traveling during the Zozobra fest.
Fireworks are involved and fire dancers perform at the base of the effigy and there is music.
Unlike the religious and historical observances that Santa Fe loves to stage, Zozobra is no kind of commemoration. It was just a prank that an old time Santa Fe artist, Will Shuster, cooked up to entertain friends back in 1924. He stuffed a 4 foot effigy full of firecrackers and sentenced him to death and everyone had a good time watching things blow up in the Shuster's back yard.
The next year they repeated the silly spectacle and eventually it became an annual town event, with the effigy getting larger and larger, and townspeople bringing more and more unwanted papers to stuff him, until the thing became immense -- after all, who doesn't like more fire?
This is how summer ends in Santa Fe.
It's another one of Santa Fe's odd public rituals: the burning of Old Man Gloom on the Friday before Labor Day. This year will be the 94th burning of this scary effigy -- a burning man decades before there was Burning Man.
Old Man Gloom is called Zozobra. He's a 50 foot tall fully functioning marionette, responsible for all the doom and gloom that happened during the past year.
He is filled with scraps of paper inscribed with a year's worth of misery. People write down their saddest thoughts or bring their divorce papers or other doleful documents and put them inside Zozobra. Then, when he burns up in a giant conflagration, everyone's woes disappear in smoke and flame.
The giant puppet is on display in town for days before the event so that people can visit him and write down their torments and stuff them inside him.
I did last year -- I wrote down what was bothering me, added my scrap to the stuffing inside him, and I felt better when my worst problems were all burned up. A satisfying redemption.
We didn't go to see the actual burning last year, though. It's held at a park north of town and the crowds are huge; over 50,000 attended last year in a town whose population is 70,000. Jim and I are not big on crowds at night, although this is a well managed family event with tight security. This year we're away traveling during the Zozobra fest.
Fireworks are involved and fire dancers perform at the base of the effigy and there is music.
Unlike the religious and historical observances that Santa Fe loves to stage, Zozobra is no kind of commemoration. It was just a prank that an old time Santa Fe artist, Will Shuster, cooked up to entertain friends back in 1924. He stuffed a 4 foot effigy full of firecrackers and sentenced him to death and everyone had a good time watching things blow up in the Shuster's back yard.
The next year they repeated the silly spectacle and eventually it became an annual town event, with the effigy getting larger and larger, and townspeople bringing more and more unwanted papers to stuff him, until the thing became immense -- after all, who doesn't like more fire?
This is how summer ends in Santa Fe.
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