The first time Caity Weaver, a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine, heard about the legend of Zozobra, she stumbled upon it almost by accident. Back in 2018, Weaver and her now-husband happened to be visiting Santa Fe, New Mexico, on the sole night of the year when one of the country’s most unique celebrations was taking place.
“We could tell that something big was going on in town, so we just kind of followed the crowd and ended up in this field, seeing an enormous puppet set on fire,” she said. “And it was fantastic.”
The burning of Zozobra, a gigantic effigy made of wood and wire and cloth, began more simply in 1924 as an eccentric way to attempt to eradicate general “gloom” and anxiety about daily life. Today, residents of the city still gather to fill the puppet with slips of paper and other objects that detail their woes about life, both big and small — and then watch collectively as Zozobra, and their problems, go up in flames.
In her latest story for the magazine, Weaver delves into the broader idea of Zozobra on the celebration’s 100-year anniversary. The piece begs one evergreen question: Could this quirky annual rite be Santa Fe’s unexpected “secret to happiness”?
At the very least, for many in Santa Fe, Zozobra does offer one thing for certain, Weaver writes: “a crucial break from the drudgery of daily existence.”
The following interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
Amanda Ulrich, Sunday Long Read: For people who have not been [to Santa Fe] before, and have never heard of Zozobra, how would you describe it?
Caity Weaver: This puppet is like, bigger, basically, than any building downtown. It’s really huge, and they set it absolutely fully on fire. The idea is that you’re kind of burning up your gloom and your anxiety when you do that. There’s a whole very complex mythology around the puppet, which is a modern invention; it’s not like an ancient creature of Santa Fe, it was invented in the ’20s by an artist from Philadelphia. And it just turns into this crazy spectacle.
Everyone in town knows what it is. Not everyone comes to it, but a lot of people do come to it, or have in the past. Maybe they grew up coming to it, maybe they found it a little later. But one of the things that I really enjoy about it is that if you don’t live in Santa Fe and haven’t happened to be here on the night when Zozobra is burned, there’s a really good chance that you have no idea what it is, even though the kind of iconography of Zozobra is very much incorporated into the town. So if you had never been here on the right evening in summer, you would just have no idea what this strange kind of demonic creature is on the side of a fire truck. It’s not explained. So you either know it or you don’t.
The other details in this story that I love are that, of course, people write their life problems, their grievances, down on pieces of paper and then they burn. But you also talk about the other things that people have burned: the medical bills, the wedding dresses. Was there one particular crazy item that stood out to you that has been burned in the past?
So when you come to [the event], you are just seeing the puppet and everything is already inside of it. I have never seen someone like shoving something in. But the chair of this event said that someone once burned a pristine guitar — like a perfect guitar — and with no explanation, just wanted this to go inside and burn. So they burned it.
I think what’s so appealing about this is, especially during the holiday season — thinking about Christmas, Hanukkah, New Year’s — there are all of these baked-in traditions for those holidays. But do you think something like Zozobra is a cool example of traditions just being what we decide they should be? That you can just start doing this thing that’s kind of cool and then eventually, 100 years down the road, that becomes its own tradition?
Yeah, for sure. And I am someone who really loves traditions. I am a big Christmas person. I love decorating. I think it’s a fun way to kind of mark the passage of time. As Zozobra shows, you can do it for 100 years in a row, even if you just make it up one day. So yeah, I think it’s a very good example that traditions can kind of be whatever you want them to be. And as long as you keep doing it, then it’s a tradition.
When you initially told your editors about this story — of course it has the ‘100 years’ news hook or news peg to it — but how did you tell them about this story, and what it was, at first?
I sent them a pitch that skewed very heavily towards just describing my experiences at Zozobra, which can be kind of chaotic. I don’t even think I put this in a draft, but I do remember that in my pitch, I described how in 2023, I waited in line [at the event] for a very long time and they were sold out of almost all the food by the time I got up to the stalls. I think I ended up getting a hot dog after like 40 minutes in line. And then I walked just a few feet away to a different stall, and ended up getting another hot dog and then a third hot dog for free. They just had so many extra hot dogs. So there’s sort of a charmingly kind of ramshackle, chaotic element to [the event]. That is another thing that I really like about it.
So hot dogs featured prominently in your pitch for the story?
Yes. Hot dogs feature prominently in, I would say, 90% of my pitches, no exception. Yeah, I had originally pitched something slightly different, although I am happy in the end that we did it the way we did. I was also thinking that it might be interesting to really follow more closely, over the course of a year, this event coming together, since it was going to be so big. And the folks who put on Zozobra are meeting all year long, every month. I went to a few of those meetings. So I had pictured something that was much more about the process and the lead-up to it.
And then, ultimately, we decided to actually really focus on the day itself and capturing most of the details from that day. And of course I did research and I interviewed people. But I think that was a good way to do it, because you want to have as many pictures and videos as possible of this thing on fire, and that only happens at the very end. So if you’re there for the whole process, it’s not on fire for most of that process.
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In your bio for the magazine, you say that you “write feature stories about contemporary American life” and that you spend your time “traipsing around, always curious and frequently baffled.” How do you generally decide what stories you’re going to work on at any given time?
That’s a good question. Well, first of all, I have a fantastic job. I’m so lucky to have my job. And they really give me a lot of leeway to come to them and say what I’m interested in. If I’m curious in something and really interested in it, we’ve often done 90% of the work at that point of getting the pitch approved. So I just sort of let my curiosity guide it for the most part.
And sometimes I actually love when my editors come to me with ideas, because I sort of feel like every idea I have I end up doing, and then it’s like, “Oh my god, well that was that idea. Now I need a new idea.” So it’s so nice when someone’s like, “Hey, have you thought about doing this?” I love hearing that. But otherwise, it’s just whatever is kind of lodging itself in my brain and that I start thinking about obsessively. And then eventually, when they ask for an idea, I just blurt out, you know, the first thing that’s on my mind.
In thinking about 2025, are there any resolutions or goals you have in terms of writing particular stories or with reporting?
I have a great job, so I just want to keep getting paid to do my job. If I could do that, then the goal has been accomplished. I think it’s always my dream that my editor will come back to me and say, “Oh, Caity, you need to make this much longer.” He has never said that. It’s always more like, “We need to cut this in half.” So that would be a nice goal. If he would come back and say, “Hey, we decided we want this to be 900 times longer,” that would make me very happy, and is something that I could easily accomplish on any topic.
So the goal is to write longer and have your editors be okay with it?
It’s a lofty goal, I don’t think it’s very realistic. I don’t see that happening, but if it did, that would be fantastic.
Compiled by Amanda Ulrich. Photo courtesy of Tom Bennett/Creative Commons via Flickr.
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