From gloom-burning to a marriage proposal, life-changing moments at Zozobra 2025

SANTA FE — Amid lasers, drones, fireworks and a cheering crowd of approximately 50,000, the 101st Zozobra marionette went up in flames Friday at Fort Marcy Park in Santa Fe.

In the hours leading up to the ceremony, the Journal asked festival-goers what “glooms” they were burning this year.

For the uninitiated, glooms are pieces of paper with the written worries, sorrows and problems — big and small — that are stuffed into the effigy prior to burning.

“I’m going to be burning self-doubt and hesitation,” said Carson Frost from Brooklyn, New York. Madison Figueroa, from Las Cruces, said, “Quitting vaping.”

Marissa Aurora, who had been bopping around the festival grounds in a fluorescent green, four-person dragon costume, took a break to put her submission into the Gloom Box. “I am attempting to burn the gloom of fear,” she said.

Wearing a steampunk hat — steampunk being the theme for this year’s burning — a young boy said, “One of my glooms is being stung by a bee.”

Janet and Elyse Newport, a mother and daughter from Portland, Oregon, dropped off their gloom together as a way to say goodbye and honor Janet’s brother, who used to come to Zozobra every year and died in April.

Rosanna from El Paso, Texas, said she was burning “everything” as she ripped pages from a notebook and listed off the many illnesses and other troubles plaguing her loved ones. “Weight, diabetes, anger management,” she said. “We have a friend who has sepsis, and we want to get rid of it.”

As Rosanna watched her glooms vanish into the Gloom Box, she smiled and gave a thumbs-up.

Astor Nix, a teenager from Colorado, came with a stack of letters she had written to various people in her life. She said the letters represented “all the things I wanted to let go of in those relationships.”

“I also burned a couple of hopes, hoping that those will go out into the world,” Nix added. “Hopes for our politics, hopes for our country, hopes for my friends and family.”

Julie Anne Overton, of Santa Fe, said her big gloom was named Donald Trump.

Other glooms were less specific.

Sophie Klein from Santa Fe said she was burning “existential doom.” Denise Fisher from Denver submitted several glooms: “In my last gloom, I put, in general, ‘idiots.’”

One woman announced, “I’m burning my house!”

“I’m ready to sell it and move on,” she clarified.

Other glooms included “not feeling good enough,” “giving energy to people who don’t deserve it,” “sadness and hate,” “stress,” “crazy turmoil,” “inertia” and “the fear of living without romantic love.”

Many declined to share their glooms publicly for fear of “jinxing” it, like a birthday wish.

Liz Probst from Las Vegas, New Mexico, dropped off a bag of approximately 150 glooms from the kindergarten and first grade classes at Luis Armijo Elementary School.

“We’re ready to start new, and heal,” Probst said.

The president of Kiwanis International, Lee Kuan Yong, had flown to Santa Fe from his home in Malaysia to speak at the event, which is sponsored by the Kiwanis Club of Santa Fe. Lee said the gloom he was burning was his “stubborn dandruff.”

“Maybe the hair will grow back and become black again,” he joked.

Along with paper glooms, participants this year submitted a range of objects, from a baby blanket to medical records to at least one wedding dress.

But while some were celebrating the end of their marriages, Brian from Clovis took the opportunity to propose. Neither he nor his girlfriend, Rachel, had ever been to Santa Fe before.

Beneath the 50-foot effigy of Zozobra, he knelt down and asked Rachel to marry him.

She said yes.