At SF’s inaugural New Year’s bash, look up
Nothing will drop, but glowing balloons will fly Mayor promises ‘surprise’ around midnight
L eave it to “The City Different” to exercise the creativity and imagination that helped earn Santa Fe its nickname to come up with a different way of ringing in the new year.
There will be no dropping of an inanimate object from atop a tall building — of which there are none in Santa Fe — as part of a climatic countdown to the new year.
And while Santa Fe’s party will include the mournful “Auld Lang Syne,” the evening’s featured song will be a traditional celebratory tune with more of a local flavor.
The city wants to produce an event that is ... well,
uplifting. And true to its reputation as a center of arts and culture, Santa Fe’s first official New Year’s Eve celebration will provide an interactive display of performance art designed to stimulate the senses — particularly the vision needed to gaze upward at floating balls of light, each one transporting a personal message into the night sky.
“I think this year is an opportunity for Santa Fe to create and lend a little bit of our own identity with the New Year’s celebration,” said Mayor Javier Gonzales, whose idea it was to stage a Dec. 31 event as part of his “People to the Plaza” initiative. “In every which way, it will truly be a New Mexico event, a Santa Fe event.”
In October, the Santa Fe City Council unanimously approved a resolution to hold a New Year’s Eve party on the Plaza, scaling back a proposed $50,000 budget attached to a plan that called for a regionally or nationally known music artist to perform prior to midnight. The consensus on the council was that finding a headliner with name recognition on short notice might be a bit ambitious and that, for starters, the event could probably be put on for half the proposed cost.
For help coordinating the event, Gonzales turned to Ray Sandoval, organizer of one of Santa Fe’s marquee events, the burning of Zozobra. “I was honored to be asked,” said Sandoval, who is volunteering his time. “It’s been challenging because of the time crunch. But we’re excited about it. If we can pull it off, it’ll be amazing.”
Sandoval said a squabble with the city of Las Cruces over a “chile drop” served as a stimulus for a planning group — which consisted of Sandoval, the mayor, Randy Randall and Cynthia Delgado from Tourism Santa Fe, and Arts Commission Director Debra Garcia y Griego — to develop something truly unique to celebrate the New Year “Santa Fe style.”
When the mayor first proposed the idea of a New Year’s celebration, he suggested that some facsimile of a chile pepper be lowered during the countdown to midnight, similar to the drop of the iconic Waterford Crystal ball in New York City’s Times Square. The problem was, Las Cruces had beaten Santa Fe to it with its own chile drop last year. The Las Cruces mayor cried foul.
“When we got resistance from Las Cruces, it forced us to think outside the box, think differently, and come up with something we could put our own stamp on,” Sandoval said.
No flying farolitos, but balloons
The idea to release glowing balloons to commemorate the arrival of Jan. 1 came up early on in the planning process, Sandoval said. The concept isn’t far removed from the beloved “flying farolitos” of the recent past, only less combustible.
For years on Christmas Eve, Santa Fe resident Arvo Thomson sent aloft candle-powered tetrahedron lanterns made of Styrofoam and tissue paper from the parking lot of Acequia Madre Elementary School, not far from the Farolito Walk on Canyon Road, which draws tens of thousands of people each year. But two years ago, in a decision that ignited a good deal of controversy, the fire marshal grounded the contraptions, declaring that the candle-lit aircraft created a fire hazard.
The balloons that will be used for the city’s new holiday celebration are safer and, as Sandoval is quick to point out, biodegradable and bird-friendly.
Instead of using a candle, a non-toxic yellow-colored glow stick will be inserted inside blue balloons before they’re filled with helium, illuminating the orb from the inside. The idea is for what organizers hope will be thousands of people to release their balloons all at once shortly after midnight.
“I think the idea is that we’re symbolically welcoming in the new year as a community in a fun and exciting way,” Gonzales said.
An event for locals
The mayor said that, while Santa Fe always welcomes visitors to the city, he expects the event to be more of a local celebration. He’s not sure how Santa Feans will respond, but believes the balloon release during the New Year’s event has the potential to become a new tradition unique to Santa Fe. “We’ll see how people react; I hope they embrace it,” Gonzales said. “I’m optimistic that it will become an annual event.”
“We hope it will make for a magical sight — make it look like stars headed into the heavens,” said Sandoval.
Like the burning of Zozobra at the end of summer, the new event will allow participants to add a personal touch.
Those who attend the annual torching at Fort Marcy Park are invited to write down their woes and put them in a “gloom box,” which is burned along with the 50-foot puppet, symbolically sending their worries up in smoke. “Part of the magic of Zozobra is you can be out among 40,000 people, yet it can still be a very personal experience,” Sandoval said.
Reversing the “Old Man Gloom” tradition, Santa Fe’s New Year event will invite folks to write down their hopes and dreams for the new year on a slip of paper. The notes will be inserted inside each participant’s balloon at the same time as the glow stick, before it’s filled with helium.
“We said, ‘Let’s turn this on its head so you start the year with hope and release those hopes up into the new year,’” Sandoval said. “If we can burn our gloom, let’s also raise our hopes.”
Sandoval said a tent will serve as a station where attendees can come to jot down their aspirations for 2016 and pick up a city-provided balloon. “Hopefully, we’ll have 1,000 balloons lifting people’s hopes up into the air,” Sandoval said.
Sandoval said he is conservatively estimating about 2,000 people will attend.
He said the event won’t interfere with the Hospice Center of Santa Fe’s annual “Light Up a Life” fundraising event held earlier the same night. Each year, hundreds of farolitos line the Plaza’s sidewalks, each one dedicated to a loved one, living or dead. “We wanted to keep that,” he said. “We felt that it was important to include the people who left us this year to join us in the celebration.”
Midnight surprise
Gonzales and Sandoval are promising a major surprise toward the end of the night.
Before that, two of Santa Fe’s musical favorites will perform. Starting about 9:30 p.m., local guitar hero Alex Maryol will warm things up. After a DJ’s mashup of top-40 hits from the year gone by, the Chicano-rock band Lumbre del Sol will provide dance music to help fend off the cold.
Sandoval said there will be nine luminarias, or bonfires, emitting the seasonal scent of piñon into the air, as well as space heaters to help keep people comfortable on a night when temperatures are expected to be in the teens or lower.
He said he expects at least two food trucks to be on hand, and Big Brothers Big Sisters will serve hot coffee, cocoa, tea and biscochitos.
In the year’s final hour, the crowd will be treated to a montage of images depicting Santa Fe projected against the facade of the Catron Building on the east side of the Plaza. “Auld Lang Syne” still gets a role — shortly before midnight, the gathering will be invited to sing it as a goodbye to 2015. After the countdown to midnight, Mayor Gonzales will lead everyone in singing “Las Mañanitas,” a traditional Mexican birthday song that ends with the line “Levántate de mañana mira que ya amanecío.” That translates as “Rise up and shine in the morning and you’ll see that here’s the dawn.”
“It’s perfect for New Year’s Eve. It’s the idea that it’s a new day, a new year,” Sandoval said.
But that’s not the big surprise that both Sandoval and Gonzales said would await revellers right around the stroke of midnight.
“I know people will have to endure the cold, but I think it’ll be worth every part of the wait to be a part of the celebration,” Gonzales said.