How good must it feel to gather up physical manifestations of your anxieties, shove them in a giant papier-mache demon and set fire to them? Wonderful, surely. The citizens of Santa Fe, New Mexico, think so: it was recently described in the New York Times as their “secret to happiness”. Every year, they stuff the Zozobra with “glooms” – representations of their fears – before burning them. These days, anything clogging your psyche can go in there: “wedding albums; medical bills; report cards; loved ones’ ashes; parking tickets”.
My fascination with folklore was nourished by a decade in Belgium, where I was initially baffled by, then sought out, the country’s best bits. I watched my sons’ primary school headteacher gleefully set fire to a Zozobra-adjacent humanoid – bonhomme hiver – to banish winter; dodged carnival figures in straw-stuffed tunics, blank white masks and vast ostrich-plume headdresses hurling oranges into crowds; and heard children cry in real terror at the prospect of being stuffed in a sack and dragged to Spain by Saint Nick’s nasty sidekick.
