So one of my little cousins had recently lost one of her first baby teeth and was SUPER excited that she called me to tell me all about it!! (She's five years old and utterly adorable).
Besides the fact of having a little hole in her smile, she couldn't stop raving about two VERY important things:
1) The Tooth Fairy
2) The dollar bills that the Tooth Fairy would leave behind under the pillow in exchange for the tooth
"The Tooth Fairy gives you DOLLAR BILLS?!?!" was my immediate reaction. Since when does she leave you anything more than a quarter?!
Many moons ago back when I was a little kid growing up in the 90s (nineteen 90s), if I was to expect a whole dollar bill under my pillow in the morning I would either have to scribble a note of desperation (these were limited because after my third note the Tooth Fairy disregarded my requests) or yank out four teeth during recess on the playground. Whether these yanked teeth were actually from my own mouth didn't cross my mind, or stop me.
But anyways, after I warned my little cousin not to be too greedy (anything more than one greenback is IRS deductible) when it comes to accepting gifts from mythological creatures such as the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, the Thanksgiving Turkey, or the Jewish Menorah, I started thinking about the origins of the Tooth Fairy. I also wondered briefly if inflation had anything to do with the increasing Tooth Fairy premiums.
After some brief yet hardcore research (shout-outs to Wikipedia and my middle school French textbook), here are my findings:
"La Petite Souris" or "the little mouse" is a French mouse that would scurry from pillow to pillow replacing children's teeth with small amounts of money overnight.
This tooth-collecting mouse most likely stems from an 18th century French fairy tale called "La Bonne Petite Souris," where a mouse changes into a fairy - or perhaps it's the other way around - to help a Queen defeat an evil King by hiding under his pillow at night and knocking out all of his chompers. Cool mouse!!
In other cultures, baby teeth are given/fed to animals so that the new teeth that come in will resemble that animal's tooth (think incisors and dogs).
Regardless of its origins, the Tooth Fairy is just a young child's distraction from the countless trials and tribulations of teenage and young-adult teeth - BRACES, WISDOOM TEETH REMOVAL, ROOT CANALS, JAW SURGERY. It's just another coming-of-age story.
Eric
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