SANTA FE, N.M. - High anxiety about White House politics, hurricane flooding and even the threat of nuclear war with North Korea is adding an extra spark to the annual burning of a giant, ghostly marionette that serves as an effigy to gloom and doom. The ritual burning of Zozobra was attracting tens of thousands of revelers Saturday to a Santa Fe city park for a mixture of wholesome and ghoulish fun. Inside the six-story puppet are reams of crumpled, handwritten notes about recent troubles and travails that people hope to leave behind. Worries this year included a combustible mix of disenchantment with politics and preoccupation over natural and manmade disasters. In preparation for the burning, Holly Garcia, a 39-year-old homemaker stuffed several notes into a slotted "gloom box" at a shopping center. The first was about a hospitalized sister and a brother recovering from brain surgery. Then came a note about the US president, and a hand-scrawled prayer for friends and former neighbors besieged by floods in League City, Texas - a community sandwiched between Houston and the Gulf of Mexico. "I put down, 'Get rid of Donald Trump!'" said Garcia, while still counting her blessings. "I'm very blessed personally, my immediate family." Yinka Adeniji, a 40-year-old technology consultant, said he wanted to join others in washing away all internal feelings of bad will - and also perhaps get rid of an inept US political system and start from scratch. "I think it's going to take a lot more than Zozobra," he said. "We're a country that doesn't want to care for its people." - AP