Of course, no one really knows much about the Tooth Fairy – what religious sect she belongs to or what she looks like. Some cultures went as far as instructing kids to feed their teeth to animals – preferably rodents – so that their permanent teeth would come back in the form of indestructible yellow stained, razor sharp rat’s teeth. Possession of any body part gave the evil witch complete control over them for the rest of their lives. In Medieval Europe, parents scared the pants off their kids by telling them that if the evil witch beat the Tooth Fairy to one of their teeth, or even fingernails and hair, they’d be in big trouble. As far as we know, she doesn’t live anywhere near the North Pole, she doesn’t have elf assistants and prefers to work surreptitiously at night. The Tooth Fairy as we know her didn’t make an appearance in the United States until the early 1900s. In those days, she was characterized as a type of “Good Fairy” with a professional dental specialization who bore gifts, much like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. If they refused to incinerate them, they’d be consigned to eternity searching for their teeth in the afterlife. During the middle ages, children were instructed to burn their lost teeth to save them from hardship. Which, in the 1950s, was a pretty decent exchange rate for something I no longer needed.Īs it turns out, the Tooth Fairy hasn’t always been embraced as an international phenomenon. My mother told me that if I put a tooth under my pillow, the Tooth Fairy would magically visit me at night and leave a dime in its place. I was introduced to the practice of exchanging my lost baby teeth for money when I was 5 years old. The one redeeming factor was that I’d be partially reimbursed by the Tooth Fairy. Even after years of religiously brushing, flossing and wrestling with my Waterpik, the entire lower left-hand quadrant as well as a few other strategically located molars had succumbed to periodontal disease, so eating anything denser than applesauce started to become a challenge. When my dentist gave me the bad news, I was naturally distraught over the possibility of losing half of my teeth.
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