On the first Friday of Labor Day weekend, just as twilight bleeds into the desert dark above Santa Fe, the crowd packed into Fort Marcy Park will begin to chant a two-word mantra as old as the city's most famous spectacle: "Burn him! Burn him!" Above them, bathed in spotlights and ringed by fireworks, a fifty-foot-six-inch effigy of a man made of wood, chicken wire and seventy yards of white cloth will writhe and groan, flail its mechanical arms, and stare down through eyes that sputter with sparks. Then the Fire Spirit will leap, torches will find their mark, and Old Man Gloom will go up in a roar of flame, taking with him, Santa Fe insists, every anxiety, regret and sorrow of the past year.
This is the Burning of Zozobra — formally, the Burning of Will Shuster's Zozobra — and on Friday, September 4, 2026, it will mark its 102nd year. The Kiwanis Club of Santa Fe, which has staged the pageant for more than six decades, opens the gates at Fort Marcy Park at 4:00 in the afternoon, the official program begins at 6:00, and after dark, weather and wind permitting, the giant marionette meets the fate to which the name his creators gave him has always condemned him. The name comes from the Spanish zozobra, meaning a deep anxiety or worry — and by burning the effigy, generations of Santa Feans have sought to incinerate their own.
The ritual's origin reads like a Santa Fe fable come true. On Christmas Eve 1923, the local artist William Howard "Will" Shuster Jr. — a member of Los Cinco Pintores, the city's storied first artist collective — gathered his painter friends for dinner at the newly opened La Fonda hotel. The mood was glum. So Shuster demanded each man write his troubles on a slip of paper; they piled the papers in the middle of the table and set them ablaze with candle flames. The restaurant staff promptly threw the group out, but the gesture lodged in Shuster's imagination.
Inspired also, as the Zozobra tradition's history records, by Yaqui Easter traditions in which an effigy of Judas was paraded through villages and set afire, Shuster built a four-foot figure in 1924 and burned it behind his own house at a backyard party. He first called his creation Old Man Groucher; it was renamed Zozobra the following year, when Shuster and E. Dana Johnson, editor of the Santa Fe New Mexican, found the Spanish word in a dictionary after their own trip to Mexico. The first public burning took place behind Santa Fe City Hall on September 3, 1926, where a six-foot wooden and muslin figure hung from a metal stake.
Zozobra has grown since — to twenty feet, to thirty-eight, to today's fifty-foot-six champion, which in 2007 earned a place in the Guinness World Records as the largest marionette in the world. In the 1930s, as crowds swelled, Shuster moved the burning to a baseball field at the newly built Fort Marcy Park, a half mile from the historic Santa Fe Plaza, where it has been held ever since. Over the years the monster gained tuxedo-like white cloth, cuffs, a bow tie and a waist sash, and a head of shredded-paper hair spray-painted a different color each year. In 1964, Shuster designated the Kiwanis Club of Santa Fe to carry on his creation, and to this day hundreds of volunteers, nearly seven hundred in recent years, spend their spring and summer assembling the effigy piece by piece in an empty space at the Santa Fe Place Mall, following Shuster's original wood-frame design scaled up over time.
Zozobra's heart, fittingly, is built from other people's pain. In the weeks before the burn, residents deliver handwritten "glooms" to collection boxes placed around Santa Fe; nearly two hundred thousand were gathered in a recent year, according to event organizers. Over the decades, the slips have grown into mementos cast off in hope of release — a wedding dress, a hospital gown, a divorce decree, a Martin guitar, even a parking ticket. Out-of-towners can submit glooms online for a small donation and have them printed and stuffed into the effigy for the fire. Profits from glooms and ticket sales, which the Kiwanis members steward carefully, benefit local children's and family charities.
The ceremony itself is a carefully choreographed pageant of light against darkness. Lights go out, and Zozobra begins to stir, calling out to his "Gloomies" — young dancers who represent children he has converted into his minions, clouding their minds and robbing them of hope. Torchbearers arrive, brave townsfolk who fight his dark intentions, only to be frightened away as Zozobra's force grows. The crowd takes up the familiar chant, and from the shadows comes his archenemy, the Fire Spirit, cloaked in red, dancing a battle against the groaning giant before finally setting him ablaze with a series of internal fireworks. As the marionette collapses into glowing embers, Shuster's way of "painting the sky" erupts overhead in a massive fireworks display, and the crowd cheers the victory of light over darkness. Only three people have ever held the coveted role of Fire Spirit: Jacques Cartier, who originated it; his protégé James "Chip" Lilienthal; and the current holder, Helene Luna, who earlier performed as the Gloom Queen. Her final performance is slated for the 102nd burning in 2026, with Than Povi Martinez, a native of Na Poh’Woh’Geh Owingeh, preparing to take up the torches in 2027.
The burning has always served as the fiery prelude to the Fiestas de Santa Fe, the September celebration held since 1712 in honor of the Spanish reconquest of the city by Don Diego de Vargas in 1692 — a connection that grounds the festival deeply in New Mexico's history. The event now draws roughly sixty thousand people each year, an attendance equal to about seventy percent of Santa Fe's entire population, and hundreds of thousands more watch it streamed online. It has survived everything from a 2020 pandemic edition, when a specially themed Zozobra wore buttons reading "2020." The crowd, predictably, burned him anyway.
In 2024, to mark the hundredth burning, the Santa Fe City Council renamed the ballpark that has hosted the event since the 1930s — long known as Magers Field — Zozobra Field at Fort Marcy Park. Event chair Ray Sandoval has summed up the tradition's enduring appeal by pointing to Santa Fe's nickname, the City Different: to take a group of volunteers, spend a year building a fifty-foot monster, and then destroy it on purpose is, he says, "pretty City Different." But for those present as the flames climb, it is something more — a communal exorcism, a sacred rite of purification, laughter and rebirth, as Shuster himself once wrote to a friend. In a handwritten note describing that first, small backyard burning in 1924, he captured the whole enterprise in a line his successors still treasure: "Tonight, we have not just witnessed a spectacle; we have participated in a sacred rite of purification, laughter and rebirth." A century later, sixty thousand people will gather at Fort Marcy Park on Friday, September 4, and watch as Old Man Gloom burns their worries to ash, confident that with him, the gloom of the old year goes smoking into the New Mexico night.