New Year’s Eve 2015 – Monigotes

New Year's Eve 2015 - Salinas - Monigotes 1

This year we decided to check out Salinas, on the coast of Ecuador, for New Year’s Eve.  You can read our first blog, covering the actual NYE event here.  This is an addendum post about the huge variety of monigotes or años viejos  that we saw in town. These doll-like figures are made from paper-maché and old clothes, sometimes filled with straw, sawdust, newspaper and firecrackers, and these puppets represent the past year. Burning the monigote at midnight on December 31st is a ritual purification to ward off the despair and bad luck of the year ending.

We have spent the prior three New Year’s Eves in Cuenca, which is where we first saw monigotes around town, and in bonfires at midnight.  We have heard of large monigote markets in Cuenca, but since we do not have a car, we rarely get to where they supposedly exist.  As such, we have only seen small sales displays of a few dozen monigotes here and there in Cuenca.

Salinas was a whole different ballgame. We passed three massive shopping areas selling monigotes enroute to Salinas. Each covered several blocks of nonstop vendors.  Some of these vendors had more monigotes themselves than we saw for sale in all of Cuenca in past years.  Many were small enough to carry under your arm, as seen above.  Some vendors would have dozens of monigotes, with each one different, while others would concentrate on one or two styles, and then have multiple copies.

New Year's Eve 2015 - Salinas - Monigotes 2 huge

Other monigotes were massive giants, sometimes 10 to 20 feet tall.  Those tended to be the more elaborately produced models, and it almost seemed a shame to burn them at midnight.  We did see a few of these giants go into the beach bonfire though.

New Year's Eve 2015 - Salinas - Monigotes 4 Special

I spent the last seven years before retirement writing software for educational toys at LeapFrog, in California.  The frog above was the first monigote we saw in Salinas.  I wanted to get him, as a reminder of LeapFrog.  Since we had not seen any others though, we thought it better to wait and see if there were better frogs later.  Nope. A lesson learned decades ago had to be repeated — if you see something you like, buy it then because you might not see another.  This was the only “good frog” we saw in town.  As it happened though, we later came across an airplane that I liked, and that became our NYE monigote instead (see yesterday’s post for photos of its life from purchase to bonfire).

New Year's Eve 2015 - Salinas - Monigotes 4 special 2

The variety of monigotes was mind boggling.  A few themes kept repeating though, some of which are represented above.  Simpsons are always a bit hit, and this year Minion joined the Most Popular List (that I just now made up…). Batman, Ninja Turtles, Spiderman, and others were seen repeatedly in various forms and sizes.

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