Stuff your troubles

The 94th annual burning of Zozobra in Sante Fe, New Mexico, will be held this year on Aug. 31.

Zozobra is a 50-foot-high, giant effigy built and burned at the start of the annual 10-day Fiestas de Santa Fe. About 45,000 people are expected for the festival at which the effigy—the name means “Old Man Gloom”—is burned to destroy the worries and bad news of the previous year experienced by those viewing the burning. In advance of the burning, people put slips of paper that record their disappointments and unhappiness in the previous year in Gloom Drop Boxes around Santa Fe. Those papers are then stuffed inside Zozobra to be burned along with him.

The burning was first held in 1924.