The Tooth Fairy
Ah, the tooth fairy. One of a company of childhood folklore figures that directly go against everything our parents tried to teach us about stranger danger. Don’t accept anything from people you don’t know. You can, however, accept gifts, money, and candy from unfamiliar fat men, fairies, and rabbits. Where does this strange tradition come from? Well, like everything else, it comes from old Norse battle traditions! The Norse believed that carrying children’s teeth into battle would protect them. We even have evidence of them wearing necklaces of said teeth. In Medieval Europe, where logic reigned, parents would hide the milk teeth of their children due to a belief that a witch could control children via their teeth. These doting parents would buy the teeth from their kids and then bury them. These traditions clearly got a nice makeover when a cute fairy was added to the story.
However, in places like South Africa, France, Italy, Spain, and many South American countries there is no cute little fairy. There is a rodent. A mouse or a rat is the one sneaking into a child’s bedroom to whisk away their milk teeth and leave money in return. In Spain (and countries that Spain colonized) that figure is called El Ratóncito Perez and he has a slew of folktales to his name and first appeared in the 1890s.
Payment is a throughline in all these myths. Money and teeth, it seems, goes hand-in-hand. Or, hand-in-mouth? When I was a child I used to receive one gold Sacagawea dollar from the “tooth fairy” for each tooth lost. A dollar seemed like a reasonable payment to me at the time and my dad thought it would be extra special for me to get mine with a Native American feminist icon on it. This was below the going rate, mind you. In 1998 the average payment was $1.30, $3.70 in 2013, and is now $6.23. There are studies proving that the rate of pay for a single tooth is tied to the value of the S&P stock index.
So, what do you prefer? A little rat guy sneaking under your pillow or a capitalist fairy who clearly plays the stock market? What is the future? Baby teeth for cryptocurrency? A horrifying thought.
[originally posted to Patreon on 20/3/25]
