SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) – High anxiety about White House politics, hurricane flooding and even the threat of nuclear war with North Korea is adding an extra spark to the annual burning of a giant, ghostly marionette that serves as an effigy to gloom and doom.
The ritual burning of Zozobra was attracting tens of thousands of revelers Friday to a Santa Fe city park for a mixture of wholesome and ghoulish fun.
Inside the six-story puppet are reams of crumpled, handwritten notes about recent troubles and travails that people hope to leave behind. Worries this year included a combustible mix of disenchantment with politics and preoccupation over natural and manmade disasters.
In preparation for the burning, Holly Garcia, a 39-year-old homemaker stuffed several notes into a slotted “gloom box” at a shopping center.
The first was about a hospitalized sister and a brother recovering from brain surgery. Then came a note about the U.S. president, and a hand-scrawled prayer for friends and former neighbors besieged by floods in League City, Texas – a community sandwiched between Houston and the Gulf of Mexico.