For most of the year, Santa Fe's most famous resident is a secret. He is assembled in pieces, in an empty retail space on the western end of Santa Fe Place Mall, out of sight of the public, by hundreds of volunteers who spend months building a fifty-foot monster they know they will destroy. Then, for one long weekend each August, the doors open and the city gets to meet him face to face. That weekend is ZozoFest, the free, family-friendly preview to the Burning of Zozobra, and in 2026 it carries an unusual weight: the 102nd incarnation of Old Man Gloom will be dressed as a king, and the whole city is invited to help overthrow him.
ZozoFest runs from Friday, August 28, through Sunday, August 30, 2026, in the former Forever 21 space at Santa Fe Place Mall, with a free sneak-peek preview party on the evening of Wednesday, August 26. Admission is free at every session, and the event is deliberately quieter and more intimate than the roaring spectacle that follows. Where the burn itself is a ticketed, high-energy pageant at Fort Marcy Park, ZozoFest is a chance to linger: to study the marionette up close, to meet the artists and Kiwanis Club volunteers who build him, to buy official merchandise and tickets, and to take part in the tradition at the heart of the whole affair — stuffing one's written worries, or "glooms," into the effigy's hollow body so they can go up in smoke on burn night.
That tradition is older than almost anyone alive. Zozobra was born on Christmas Eve 1923, when the artist William Howard "Will" Shuster Jr. sold a painting he had labored over for five months and decided to celebrate with his fellow members of Los Cinco Pintores, the "five painters" who helped turn Santa Fe into an art colony. Shuster, a Pennsylvania native who had been gassed in the trenches of World War I and told by his doctor to head west to extend his life, was annoyed to find his friends gloomy despite the free dinner at the newly opened La Fonda hotel. He handed each of them a piece of paper, demanded they write down what was bothering them, and set the papers alight with the table candle. The restaurant staff threw them out, and the friends ended up laughing together on the curb. The seed of a ritual was planted.
Months later, in April 1924, Shuster traveled to Mexico and witnessed a Yaqui Good Friday celebration in which an effigy of Judas was paraded through town, berated, and set on fire. He married that image to his Christmas Eve experiment and built a six-foot effigy he called "Old Man Groucher," which he burned in his backyard for his artist friends. The first public burning followed in September 1926, when a twenty-foot figure was set alight behind Santa Fe City Hall to the strains of a funeral march, with Kiwanians in black robes circling the monster and fireworks exploding from its frame. By then Shuster and E. Dana Johnson, editor of the Santa Fe New Mexican, had found the creature's name in a Spanish-English dictionary: zozobra, a word that means anxiety, gloom, and being shipwrecked all at once. It stuck.
Shuster personally oversaw the building of Zozobra for decades, scaling the figure up over the years from twenty feet to thirty-eight to the roughly fifty-foot marionette of today. In 1964 he signed over all rights to the Kiwanis Club of Santa Fe, which has carried on the tradition ever since as its primary annual fundraiser, donating net proceeds to nonprofits that support children across New Mexico. The club's volunteers now toil in that mall space, wrapping chicken wire over wooden frames, stuffing the holes with shredded paper collected year-round, and draping the whole thing in some seventy yards of cloth. The result is one of the world's largest functioning marionettes, able to wave its arms, turn its head, and growl at the crowd through a gaping mouth. Transporting the three-thousand-pound figure to Fort Marcy Park requires several vehicles.
The mythology Shuster built around his creation is as elaborate as the construction. Old Man Gloom is the physical embodiment of humanity's negative energy, invited to the Santa Fe Fiesta as the guest of honor — but the celebration is a trick, designed not to honor him but to destroy him. The crowd's positive energy is channeled through the Fire Spirit, a dancer in a flowing red costume who taunts Zozobra with blazing torches before the final burn. The role has been passed down through generations of performers, from former New York City ballet dancer Jacques Cartier, who danced it for thirty-seven years, to his student James Lilienthal, who held it for more than three decades, to the current Fire Spirit, Santa Fe native Helene Luna. The glooms stuffed inside the figure are the fuel for this catharsis: handwritten notes, photographs, divorce decrees, hospital gowns, paid-off mortgages, even obsolete police reports. In recent years nearly 200,000 glooms have been collected in a single season, dropped into "gloom boxes" around the city or submitted online for a small donation.
For 2026, the Kiwanis Club has given Old Man Gloom his most theatrical costume yet. The theme of the 102nd Burning of Zozobra is "The Tyranny of Gloom vs. the Spirit of '76," developed in partnership with the nonpartisan America250 Commission to mark the 250th anniversary of American independence. In a mischievous twist, Zozobra will swagger onto Fort Marcy Field having plundered King George III's royal robes, crown, and scepter — symbols of domination he hopes to wield over Santa Fe and beyond. The torchbearers, for the first time in event history, will take the hill at Fort Marcy Park and throw off tea in a mock Boston Tea Party, while the Fire Spirit makes a midnight horseback ride as Paul Revere, lantern in hand. A Revolutionary-era costume contest will round out the night. "We're going to have some fun celebrating not only our history and culture in Santa Fe, but also our shared history as Americans," event chair Ray Sandoval told the Santa Fe New Mexican.
ZozoFest is where that story begins. Visitors can see the royal villain up close, take selfies with him looming over their shoulders, and watch the artists and Kiwanis builders who brought him to life. The festival also hosts the official Zozobra Art Exhibit, featuring one-of-a-kind works by regional artists in every medium alongside hundreds of drawings by Santa Fe Public School students, all celebrating the city's oldest malcontent. Free craft tables, sponsored by Nusenda Credit Union, let children build their own mini-Zozobra art and gloom boxes. On Saturday, August 29, a classic car show rolls into the mall's parking lot, with awards for lowriders, classic cars and trucks, and lowrider bikes, while DJs keep the revolutionary spirit of '76 spinning all weekend. The Kiwanis Club's booth sells general admission tickets for the September 4 burn — $30 in advance, with discounts for New Mexico residents, students, seniors, and military personnel — along with posters, T-shirts, blankets, and collectibles.
There is a poignancy to the whole enterprise that the Kiwanis Club understands well. "When the Kiwanis Club builds Zozobra, we accept that we also have to get rid of him," Sandoval said. "This is his purpose, but the artwork created in his likeness lets him stay alive all year round as a meaningful part of our history and culture." The 2024 centennial brought a permanent tribute: the City Council renamed the ballpark at Fort Marcy Park "Zozobra Field" and unveiled a monument and time capsule at the park's entrance, with capsules to be opened in 25, 50, 75, and 100 years. The tradition Shuster began in a backyard in 1924 has run without fail ever since, drawing an average of 60,000 people to the burn each year — roughly 70 percent of Santa Fe's entire population. ZozoFest offers a gentler way in, a climate-controlled, indoor space where the city's most famous monster can be met without the roar of the crowd. For one weekend, Old Man Gloom is on display, waiting patiently in his stolen royal robes, ready to accept the worries Santa Feans are eager to hand over. Then he is taken apart, moved to the field, and, on the night of September 4, burned away — so the city can start fresh, as it has for more than a century.