“Tomorrow is New Year’s Eve,” She tells me.
“Yes, I know. Are you excited?”
“Of course! There will be fireworks, and there will be parties, and we will burn the dolls,”
I know exactly what she’s talking about. Of course, the celebrations started right after Christmas, and would actually end several days after New Year’s had come and gone. The fireworks, I understand. But the burning of paper-mache and cardboard effigies is beyond me, a cultural tradition I know about, but still can’t quite grasp.
They start selling the figures weeks in advance, and then, on New Year’s Eve, they set them on fire, to blaze in the streets with wild taunts and laughter, jumping over the effigies and going on about how the old year is finished with, how the old year is dying. After surviving the start of 2013, I knew all about the doll-burning. I know all about what and how, but not why.
“But why?” I think aloud.
“Why… why what?” she asks, puzzled.
“Um, I said, why burn the dolls?”
“We burn them because, well, because they represent the old year. You know that,”
I nod. “Oh, sure,”
“And the old year is over,” She adds. “It’s just so we can remember. You know that, too,” she smiles.
“Yes,” now I know, but I still don’t understand.
Fire consumes the effigies, but not the sins and mistakes of the old year.
Fire, too, will consume those who don’t understand -and then accept- the One who can take away those sins, those mistakes. I don’t want to think about that. Not right now. I smile to try and cover up my long silence.
“How about an ice cream?”
But I can’t get it out of my head.
-Madeline Studebaker