The woman approached the “gloom” table flanked by two boys, perhaps seven or eight years old. They advanced quietly—at least compared with the melee of people feverishly jotting down their glooms and stuffing them into one of several glittery boxes festooned with flames and Zozobra’s image.
The sun had just begun its slow late-summer descent, leaving a fuchsia streak in the sky and a rising anticipatory hum in Santa Fe’s Fort Marcy Park, as the clock ticked closer to the burn. The mom and her sons wore identical plaintive expressions and appeared to have a question. At first, the encounter conformed to the general traffic pattern at the Burning of Zozobra gloom table, where I have volunteered for the last 20 or so years. People come either as seasoned pros—frequently with their written grievances already prepared to hand over—or as newcomers eager to learn what’s going on.
The short story on the annual Labor Day weekend fete, hosted by the Kiwanis Club of Santa Fe, is this: In 1924, artist William “Will” Howard Shuster Jr. created the first Zozobra to burn at a backyard party in Santa Fe with a group of fellow artists and writers known as Los Cinco Pintores. Shuster drew inspiration from Easter Holy Week traditions in the Yaqui communities of Arizona and Mexico. He and newspaper editor E. Dana Johnson devised the Spanish name Zozobra for the creation, which translates to anguish, anxiety, or gloom.
Since then, Shuster’s creation and the event that celebrates his fiery demise have both grown exponentially. The first Zozobra measured approximately six feet tall. These days, Old Man Gloom reaches 50 feet tall
