Saturday 10 December 2011

Curtain Up on Act II for the Tooth Fairy


“I lost my tooth!” she announced. Within seconds, she and her twin sister were jumping around the house as if an ice cream truck had just pulled into town, covered in mermaids and rainbows. Minutes later, though, Tybee suddenly started to cry. “But what if the tooth fairy doesn’t come?” she asked.

Um, sweetheart, not so fast.

What I am about to say is likely to get me into trouble. But before you start throwing things, please hear me out. With that out of the way, here goes: I hate the tooth fairy.

Just to be clear, this is not some grumpy Scrooge-like curse on all innocent childhood pleasures, from puppies to picnics. I have actual reasons.

First, I don’t believe in giving financial rewards for routine biological events. If you do so for lost teeth, why not broken bones, excised tonsils or, God forbid, menstruation?


And as anyone with multiple children knows, the older kids invariably learn the truth before the little ones have even started the process, meaning parents are obliged to ask some of their children to lie to their siblings. The one value the tooth fairy is sure to teach is mendacity.

Just to be fair, I will now list all the redeeming qualities of the tooth fairy. Feel free to shout them out when they come to mind. I’m still waiting. Hold on, there’s one from the back of the room. “Kids like it.” Well, yes, they also like candy for breakfast. Any more positive traits? “It’s tradition.” Actually, even that’s not entirely true.

The idea that teeth have ritual meaning goes as far back as the Bible, with King David and others appealing to God to rip out the teeth of their enemies. Some African tribes refused to crown chiefs if their teeth were broken. Even Freud got into the act, insisting the loss of teeth symbolically represents castration. Imagine what he would have done with the fact that most people today view the tooth fairy as female?

Over the centuries, many cultures developed rituals to mark children’s loss of their deciduous teeth, which usually begins around 5 or 6. In some societies, witches were believed to covet discarded teeth for spells, so proper disposal was paramount. Children have variously tossed their teeth onto the roof (Vietnam, Haiti), buried them with ancestors (New Guinea), fed them to mice (Mexico, Afghanistan) or even burned them.

Americans were the first to popularize the idea of a tooth fairy early in the 20th century, though the custom did not become widespread until the 1950s, according to research by Rosemary Wells, a dental lecturer who lived in Chicago. American parents introduced two wrinkles to the age-old ritual, neither one for the better

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