December 20, 2018 • 26 mins
For millions of kids in the West, the story is as mysterious as it is profitable: Once your baby teeth begin falling out, hide them beneath your pillow. Sometime in the night, the Tooth Fairy will retrieve the tooth, leaving you some cash -- perhaps spare change, perhaps as much as twenty dollars -- to thank you for your gift. So where does this idea come from? Join the guys as they explore the strange, surprisingly recent origin of the Tooth Fairy. (And parents, if you're listening with your kids, be warned: This episode does include spoilers.)
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:23):
Growing up in the West, many of us as children
encounter strange myths and traditions. One of the most famous
is Santa Clause. But you know, the one that always
terrified me was the tooth fairy. Yes, yes, I had.
I had a a deep and abiding fear of the
(00:44):
tooth fairy. I didn't like losing teeth and I didn't
like touching metal. I never have. So the idea that
there would be someone who sneaks in and like switches
this tooth that I have to sleep on top of
with metal, you know, some in the under the cover
of dark. It's a perfect storm of nightmare fuel for
you and young Ben. It's true. It's true, nol, it's true.
(01:08):
What about you were you were you a tooth fairy kid? Yeah? Yeah,
and you know and being a dad myself. Um. By
the way, we need to a quick disclaimer here. Spoiler
alert for a certain child based things. Ah, yes, spoiler
alert for stuff that's on a need to know basis.
There you go. Yeah, that's a good diplomatic way. So
(01:29):
we're gonna do a countdown five, four, three to one. Yes,
So my kid just now figured out that the tooth
fairy is is is me and and her mom. Did
you get caught? No? I didn't. But it just finally
was like, she's like when she's at my house, she
gets a certain amount of money. She's a mom's house,
she gets a certain amount of money. And it kind
(01:51):
of started being like, wait a minute, what maybe that
was our fault. We should have coordinated a little bit better.
But yeah, she was into it and I was about
it as well. Um, and I see the benefits of it.
But Robert Lamb from Stuff to Blow Your Mind made
a really good point about how with things like the
Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus, we do a really bad
job as a culture differentiating between like myth and tradition
(02:15):
has to be taken so literal and become like a
lie to children. I have. I have resented the Santa
Claus lie for a long time, and I'm really happy
to be done with that because it really made me
feel uncomfortable and there's yeah, there's some double think. It's
so strange too, because on another podcast, Stuff they Want
(02:35):
you to Know, one of the points that haunted me
before for years on that show was most people growing
up in the US, just statistically speaking, the first conspiracy
theory they learn about is Santa Clause and the conspiracy
thing is reels. Can you like that changes the way
you think about authority and parents and anyone over ten?
(02:56):
Do you remember Pete and Pete the Nickelodeon show Redheaded Others?
I love that. I just remember the tattoo. The tattoo, Yeah,
you would make your dance or whatever. But that show
also had a bunch of really cool guest appearances from
like interesting musicians like Michael Stipe. First place I ever
heard of who Iggy pop was. But in that show,
there's a thing called like the International Adult Conspiracy. I
(03:17):
believe it's what it's called. And that is exactly what
this kind of stuff is. It is an agreed upon
the lie that you feed your children. And I just
felt uncomfortable with it because I'm like, is she gonna
ever trust anything? I say again, Yeah, especially if she
figures it out herself. And I never like come clean. Oh,
speaking of coming clean, it's time to introduce everybody to
(03:38):
our mutual favorite part of our show, super producer Casey
Pegram Casey, I've got to ask, when did you figure
out that the tooth Fairy was not in fact a
supernatural creature. I think I figured it out pretty early
on and kind of kept up the illusions a little
(03:59):
bit very parents, well, my own financial benefits, That's what
I'm saying, because once you stop believing, then the cash
dries up. What was your exchange rate for a tooth
if you don't mind me as, I want to say,
maybe five or ten bucks? Pretty rich. And if you
were a child in the United States, in you got
(04:23):
an average of three dollars and seventy cents per lost tooth.
And that's twenty jump over last year's rates rate of
three dollars a tooth. And it's interesting too because it's
obviously an average. So uh, some kids might get a
twenty spot for their tooth, some kids might just get
a buck. And I believe that that was tracked regionally
(04:43):
and that it was found that in the South where
we live, that's where the tooth fairy was the stingiest, uh,
And I believe up north is where they were a
bit more generous. Yeah, so this is weird. I'm not
gonna say who in my family. But there was also
a practice that I thought was normal, wherein it was
(05:05):
kind of a surprise or a gamble to see how
much money the tooth fairy would leave you, because our
tooth fairy in our family was like pretty uh, pretty discerning,
and so some teeth would get more money because they
were better somehow, like a canine tooth at a point
was considered you know, a nice it's like tulips. It
(05:27):
was like tulips, except with just this invisible fairy creature. Yeah.
And speaking of like, you know, tooth fairy money as
some sort of financial indicator, Delta Dental I believe we
actually go through through our company, UM, a dental insurance company,
actually tracked the average exchange for a tooth from two
(05:48):
thousands up to two thousand sixteen, and they correlated it
with the changes in the SNP five market and found
that it was pretty close. Oh wow, interesting and this
is super interesting, man. This is a lot of this
is from a fabulous article from our friends over at
Mental flaws UM. The tooth fairy inspired this researcher to
(06:08):
come up with something called tooth fairy science. Do you
want to talk about that, man, Tooth fairy science. Yeah,
it's important, but it's not near as whimsical as it sounds.
An Air Force flight surgeon skeptic and critic of alternative
medicine named Dr Harriet Hall coined this term to essentially
describe the importance of making sure some event, object, or
(06:32):
phenomena is real before attempting to study it. That's right,
because the example here is if you are studying, uh,
the amount of money the tooth fairy leaves and averaging
it out. Um, you might think that you're just studying
the behavior of to the tooth fairy or tooth fairies. Um,
but what you're actually studying is the behavior of parents.
(06:53):
And so if you are studying a thing that doesn't
really exist, there might be another thing that is actually
doing the thing that you're studying that you even considered.
And so it's just an important way to create good
data and also to plan good studies. Yeah, and this
is interesting because we're we're looking at so many cultural
things that describe the tooth fairy. One of the things
(07:18):
that I think is fascinating it's when something we were
focusing on for this episode is the origin of the
tooth fairy. Because there there's so many things like Santa Claus, Christmas, trees,
the Easter bunny, things of that nature that we accept
growing up as normal, normal things. You know. Even though
uh many of these will be tied to a religious practice,
(07:41):
secular kids practice them too because Christmas or Hanukah. That
that kind of stuff is just cool, you know what
I mean? And what I think will surprise a lot
of people here is that the origins of the tooth
fairy are at least the two fairs we understand it
in the US, the origins are fairly recent. We can
(08:01):
trace back ancient tales of tooth related rites of passage.
That stuff is really fascinating, like tooth tossing, the throwing
of the teeth, which is appears across several different cultures,
which is really interesting. The vikings did it, especially baby teeth? Yeah, yeah,
(08:21):
the offering of a tooth to a rat because it
would make your like a rat or a rodent of
some sort, because it was thought to ensure that the
child's teeth would grow strong. And that's really interesting when
we get into the modern day tooth fairy myth, or
at least the story that likely was the cause of
it um where the tooth fairy is in fact a rodent. Yes, yes,
(08:46):
it's true. So we know that, at least in Europe,
The ritual of of how to handle one's shed baby
teeth is global. There are just different rituals around it.
Like you said, nold, Uh. This tradition in your up
at least dates back to the earliest written records in
Norse and Northern European cultures, and during the Middle Ages,
(09:08):
there were superstitions about children's teeth, like you had to
burn your baby teeth to save a child from hardship
in the afterlife, or um, you would wear children's teeth
to bring you good luck in battle, or you would
bury teeth to hide them from witches. And it's interesting
(09:29):
because back then it was thought that if a witch
were to get ahold of your teeth, the which would
have power over you. It's kind of weird, right, it
is a little weird. So what's this? Uh, what's this
original story? Because we can kind of trace it back, right,
it's neat, but it's really cool because it kind of
incorporates some of the things we were just talking about.
So it turns out that the tooth fairy. The origins
(09:49):
of the tooth fairy date back to eighteenth century France,
when a fairy tale called oh boy trying to do
Casey proud la bon pet la bon petit slowly, so
he and what does that translate to, sir, It's like
the good little mouse. Oh, it's the good little mouse.
And it's the good little casey on the case. So
(10:11):
this is the story of le bon petit, the good mouse.
There is a an evil king who imprisons a good queen,
and the queen is sort of like a you know,
a snow white type figure. She can talk to the
animals and all that, and so she gets a little
mouse to help her out of this jam. That's right,
(10:33):
that's right. And the mouse, luckily for her, it turns
out not to just be an intelligent, plucky little rodent. Also,
the mouse is secretly a fairy and once revealed to
be a member of the fair folk or of faye uh,
the former mouse frees the queen and then knocks out
all of the king's teeth. Yis, at which point, as
(10:55):
because she would naturally do in fairy tale logic, he
hides these teeth under the king's pillow and then eventually,
as the king killed. So that's not creepy at all. Well,
we could do, you know, we I'm sure everyone listening
this has heard stories before about how much more morbid
and graphic the original version of fairy Tales are, you
(11:17):
know what I mean. So don't let the patina of
Disney feel good y fool you about the true nature
fairy tales. But that's fantastic, right, So this goes back
to what we're saying earlier about the cultural thing with rodents,
rodents and teeth and the sacrifice of teeth, the offering
up of teeth and the pillow even exactly. Yeah, so
(11:43):
let's fast forward a little bit to an especially pivotal
article that was written in nineteen eight. That's right, because
one of the earliest mentions of the tooth Fairy, which
that that is not the language used in in the play, right, No,
it's it's the cute little mouse fairy, right, their teeth
involved in the pillow, and that that kind of cements
(12:05):
the whole mythology of the tooth Fairy, but doesn't really
have a name yet. So in a column in the
Chicago Daily Tribune in nineteen o eight, uh called Household Hints,
somebody writes in and suggests that, um, I'm gonna quote it,
and this is also cribbing this from this mental flass
article that has a list of unexpected things about the
tooth Fairy. Um many a refractory child will allow a
(12:28):
loose tooth to be removed if he knows about the
tooth Fairy. If he takes his little tooth and puts
it under the pillow when he goes to bed, the
tooth Fairy will come in the night and take it away,
and in its place will leave some little gift. And
then you've got to play. That comes out in the
late twenties by Esther Watkins called The Tooth Fairy, and
(12:49):
that's history. And this was a rerelease of that original
French story, The Good Little Mouse. It was in English.
It was in ninety seven specifically, and this is where
the mouse Fairy character becomes cemented with some of the
imagery that we have seen before, the wings in particular,
(13:09):
and they're they're scattered references afterwards in around this time
to the Tooth Fairy in the first half of the
twentieth century, but it doesn't really hit its boom. It's
Malcolm Gladwell esque tipping point until after World War Two.
Because one of the most popular stories in call Your's
(13:31):
magazine in mentions the Tooth Fairy and this, you know,
this makes it a little bit more legitimate. But from
what what we found, the tooth fairy didn't even enter
uh in encyclopedia until what the late seventies, a very
(13:51):
modern American creation. M hmm. Yeah, it's much more recent
than you might think. And according to some who have
researched the history of the tooth fairies, such as Michael
Hingston over at Salon, we can't overestimate the amount of
influence corporations had over the creation of tooth fairy. So
(14:16):
we said, so, like, you know, the old story was
Santa Claus before the Coca Cola Santa. The appearance of
Santa vary widely. He might be really skinny, his costume differed.
But once a soda company made this sort of uh pleasant,
ruddy cheeked guy who's always wearing the same costume, they
(14:38):
sort of codified this icon, first in the US and
now around the world. That's how people think of Santa
Claus often. So he puts the finger at a another
corporate entity. That sort of solidified the idea of the
tooth fairy. And you can find this article it's called
Don't Tell the Kids. The real history of the tooth fairy.
(14:58):
In this he delves into the work of perhaps the
most influential, most prominent tooth fairy scholar scholar, Yeah, tooth
fairy scholars, Rosemary Wells, right, exactly, Rosemary Wells. And she
saw what we've been seeing that the practice of you know, um,
(15:19):
dealing with teeth in a ritualistic way, I guess for
lack of about Yeah, I know, was a thing across cultures,
but there was precious little known about the the origins
of the tooth fairy. And she's the one who kind
of dug in and found a lot of this stuff
and really went to town. She interviewed all kinds of folks,
anthropologists and parents and kids, and came out with a
series of articles, um to get to the heart of
(15:42):
this mythical creature, the root character, the root, indeed the
root that was a joke from a previous episode. Yeah yeah,
yeah yeah. So she dove into this and became known
as like the global expert on these traditions, the evolution
(16:03):
of this in the zeitgeist. She even opened up the
tooth Fairy Museum in her home in Deerfield, Michigan. So
people who study this will tell you that there are
several factors that led to the tooth fairies um agreed
upon depiction here in the US. And first we should
mention for a long time, no one agreed with the
(16:24):
tooth fairy looked like right, that's right. It wasn't really
a prominent feature, which just kind of a winged, tiny
creature a thing that happened. Yeah, you know, especially since
the origins were it being a literal mouse, right, right,
So this changes a little bit the animation giant Disney
starts using fairies and fairy godmothers in the nineteen fifties
(16:48):
in a lot of their films like Tinkerbell and Cinderella's right,
So you get this image of like, this is what
a fairy. It's not a long jump to just insert
that visual that Disney provided the public consciousness with and
there you got your tooth fairy. Yeah, it's like, hey see,
this is what a fairy looks like. Now that one
is just a tooth themed fairy lack of I've always
(17:11):
pictured the tooth Fairies being a Tinkerbell esque figure. Yeah
you know what, Uh, I'm right there with you, man.
There's there's another thing that happens here right around the
same time, because we said the tooth fairy didn't really
blow up till post World War two US. Right, that's
an economic boom, there's an increase in prosperity. If you're
living through the Great Depression, you might not have a
(17:32):
nickel to give a kid, Absolutely not, that would be
a frivolous use of a nickel. And then secondly, at
least as it's argued in Forbes magazine, uh, the child
centered view of the American family doesn't really come into
play until post World War two. Now again this is Forbes,
but the author argues that after World War Two it
(17:54):
became normal for parents to cater to their children, to
kind of dote on them, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, before
they have them, like working in the fields or whatever.
You know. There's an interesting idea here too, which is
equating a painful, scary experience for children to some sort
of reward, like you'd be brave, get that tooth out,
(18:14):
you got a dollar coming your way or a nickel
or whatever. Super capitalist not to mention, you can even
double down on that and make it about like hey,
if you brush your teeth thrill, well, the tooth fair
will give you more money or whatever. You know, nice parenting,
parenting jiu jitsu. That's a great move. I'm impressed with you,
(18:34):
so we I think we already taught. Now she knows
I'm a dirty liar, so you know nothing. I say. Well, ever,
stand again. You tell her you're a dirty liar who
kept her teeth clean. It might be a Jack Nicholson
moment for you, like in that what was what's name
that film? A Few Good Men? You can't handle the tooth.
That's funny, that's cute. I like that. Speaking of handling
(18:55):
the teeth, that's another part of the whole Rigamar role.
Is you gotta kind of sneak in like a thief
in the night and and abscond with the tooth from
under your sleeping child's pillow and then shove it somewhere.
I have a drawer full of baby teeth somewhere. I
always pictured you as that kind of guy. Yeah, speaking
of that, though, you told me a really interesting story
about someone who stumbled upon a cash of teeth in
(19:18):
a building, in the walls of a building here in Georgia. Yes,
that's true. In October of this year in Valdosta, Georgia,
which is in South Georgia for people unfamiliar with the state.
There were some construction workers who were at the T B.
Converse building and they were trying to prepare the place
for the essentially trying to renovate it, and they wanted
(19:42):
to get it ready for a new commercial tenant. And
that's when they discovered around one thousand individual teeth buried
in a wall on the second floor. But the tooth
ferry were in fact real. Yeah, I know, you're just
shuddering your way through this one. I appreciate you sticking,
staying without a taking one for the team. But that
would be like the tooth fairies, like Burrow, like Den.
(20:03):
Perhaps that's what they do with the teeth, right, that's
the to me as a kid, isn't it. What the
hell is that fairy doing with those teeth? Like the
bone collector right right? Like the bone Club any I mean,
if you think about it, this is a weirdly common trope,
like Cereal mascots, you know, like the Lucky Charms guy.
He's just taking all these charms. What's he doing with them?
(20:26):
It's freakish, you know. He's also really skinny too, so
he's always not eating at all. Yeah, yeah, and it's
not like the tooth fairy is putting the teeth in
its mouth and getting a bigger smile. Though that's a
great idea for a horror story, and there is in
fact a spooky tooth fairy. I believe, not to mention
a silly tooth fairy starring the Rock and then subsequent
I believe, straight to video sequels Larry the Cable Guy.
(20:49):
So I would love to see Tom Waits's tooth fairy.
It's like a haggard old wizard with like tiny wings
and he comes in. He's like, gotta keep quiet, Mr Pocket. Yes,
you guys haven't seen Tom Waits in the ballot of
Busters Cross. We gotta let it go. Absolute delight. So
(21:16):
I feel like we we have learned a lot here.
The tooth Fairy is, at least the way we understand
it is so much more recent. It's that prospollination of
this mouse that sneaks into a kid's bedroom, and then
this general idea of the quote unquote good fairy. Right,
we just sort of smushed them together America style melt
(21:39):
melt there we go, Yeah, we fond dude it and
then it caught on and spread like wildfire. I feel
like there's also an economic aspect to this too, you
know what I mean. It's not like put your teeth
under your pillow and you get to spend more time
with your loved ones. It's put your teeth on your pillow.
(22:00):
Here's three dollars and seventy cents. Yeah, and and those
dollars in nickels and tens and twenties, and guy, I
wonder for any kids ever got a hundred? Surely, surely, yeah,
somewhere must be nice anyway. Yeah, add up to two
hundred and fifty six million dollars um. That is is bonkers. Yeah,
(22:21):
and there's okay. I found the quote that I wanted
to I wanted to us to hear about the economic part.
And I appreciate you putting in that huge number, that
statistic for us. So, going back to Christina and Kilgrove's
article in Forbes, she says the tooth Fairy holds a
shorter and less visible pedigree than Santa Claus, but her
(22:42):
macro economic function in today's society differs only in degree.
Santa Clauss promises pre monetary goodness gets you barbies or
a Rambo doll. The tooth fairies promises more modern anything,
even your own body, can be turned into gold. That,
in its final reductive wisdom, is precisely the vaunted magic
(23:04):
of free enterprise. That is dark and spot on. Actually, man,
do you want to rattle off a couple of these,
uh other maybe non monetary traditions at the end here
or should we just leave it with that amazing quote?
I think, I don't know. Let's maybe we can find
something a little less dark dark. Yeah, let's talk about
some of the other traditions that persist. Let's travel around
(23:27):
the world. So we've been to the United States, but
we talked about we we talked about tooth tossing, right, Yeah,
it's true in countries like Turkey and even Greece or Mexico. Um,
kids throw their teeth onto the roof. Why, I don't know,
(23:48):
that's where they belong. Good, good luck, I guess I'm
not sure. Ben. You mentioned something earlier about how it
would uh maybe encourage healthy growth of adult teeth. But
in the Philippines, Korea, India, and Vietnam, only the lower
teeth get tossed. Oh, I remember this, because the upper
(24:10):
teeth go on the floor and the idea is that
through I guess, sympathetic magic or attraction, the new tooth
will grow toward the old one. Smart makes sense, right,
it does make sense. Uh. And then there are other
tooth tossing things where sometimes the kid will yell out
a wish while they're tossing a tooth, which makes I
(24:31):
guess makes more sense to me for some reason, because
it feels like an exchange, very instant exchange. Well, I
don't have a tooth to throw, Ben, but I wish
we could just keep talking about teeth forever. But I
don't think you make it. You're shuddering at this point.
You're you're literally you're in a cold sweat. Yeah, but
we're doing this for the ridiculous historians. I'm doing it
for you all throughout Central Asia. If you have a
(24:54):
kid that loses a tooth, remember it's traditional to put
the tooth into some fat and feed it to a dog.
Please don't try that. I don't know how a dog
would digest a tooth. This is done because the idea
is that the grown up tooth that replaces it will
be as strong as a dog's tooth, and if there's
no dog around, bury it by a tree so that
the new tooth and strong roots. That's that's that's a
(25:15):
quote from a mental flossol. That's wonderful. That's wonderful. So
do you have kids, how did you handle the tooth
fairy growing up? You know what I mean? I'd love
to hear from people who didn't really have it as
a thing in their house, because not everybody does. Absolutely,
Or if you're a parent, how do you feel about
the tooth fairy? Lie? Let us know. You can write
(25:36):
to us a ridiculous at how stuff works dot com,
where you can hit us up on our Facebook group,
the Ridiculous Historians, where we just have a good old
time hanging out by the Internet fire, you know, warming ourselves,
burning our teeth, drinking hot cocoa together with the other
ridiculous historians that hang out. There's a lot of fun.
Casey gets on, Jonathan strict On, the the quister gets on,
or as you like to call him, Ben the Quizzler,
(25:58):
just to take him down to pat you gotta take
a down when he gets big. He is a hotty boy.
Sometimes he gets big, a little too big, a little big,
little big. So thanks also to Alex Williams, you can
pose our track thanks to you, Noel Brown. Uh and
it sounds like you're doing a pretty solid job navigating
the ethically fraught path of parenthood. Well, you know, when
(26:19):
it all came out, she definitely didn't hate me or
distrust me, So I guess I'm doing okay. We'll see
you next time, Fox,
Growing up in the West, many of us as children
encounter strange myths and traditions. One of the most famous
is Santa Clause. But you know, the one that always
terrified me was the tooth fairy. Yes, yes, I had.
I had a a deep and abiding fear of the
(00:44):
tooth fairy. I didn't like losing teeth and I didn't
like touching metal. I never have. So the idea that
there would be someone who sneaks in and like switches
this tooth that I have to sleep on top of
with metal, you know, some in the under the cover
of dark. It's a perfect storm of nightmare fuel for
you and young Ben. It's true. It's true, nol, it's true.
(01:08):
What about you were you were you a tooth fairy kid? Yeah? Yeah,
and you know and being a dad myself. Um. By
the way, we need to a quick disclaimer here. Spoiler
alert for a certain child based things. Ah, yes, spoiler
alert for stuff that's on a need to know basis.
There you go. Yeah, that's a good diplomatic way. So
(01:29):
we're gonna do a countdown five, four, three to one. Yes,
So my kid just now figured out that the tooth
fairy is is is me and and her mom. Did
you get caught? No? I didn't. But it just finally
was like, she's like when she's at my house, she
gets a certain amount of money. She's a mom's house,
she gets a certain amount of money. And it kind
(01:51):
of started being like, wait a minute, what maybe that
was our fault. We should have coordinated a little bit better.
But yeah, she was into it and I was about
it as well. Um, and I see the benefits of it.
But Robert Lamb from Stuff to Blow Your Mind made
a really good point about how with things like the
Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus, we do a really bad
job as a culture differentiating between like myth and tradition
(02:15):
has to be taken so literal and become like a
lie to children. I have. I have resented the Santa
Claus lie for a long time, and I'm really happy
to be done with that because it really made me
feel uncomfortable and there's yeah, there's some double think. It's
so strange too, because on another podcast, Stuff they Want
(02:35):
you to Know, one of the points that haunted me
before for years on that show was most people growing
up in the US, just statistically speaking, the first conspiracy
theory they learn about is Santa Clause and the conspiracy
thing is reels. Can you like that changes the way
you think about authority and parents and anyone over ten?
(02:56):
Do you remember Pete and Pete the Nickelodeon show Redheaded Others?
I love that. I just remember the tattoo. The tattoo, Yeah,
you would make your dance or whatever. But that show
also had a bunch of really cool guest appearances from
like interesting musicians like Michael Stipe. First place I ever
heard of who Iggy pop was. But in that show,
there's a thing called like the International Adult Conspiracy. I
(03:17):
believe it's what it's called. And that is exactly what
this kind of stuff is. It is an agreed upon
the lie that you feed your children. And I just
felt uncomfortable with it because I'm like, is she gonna
ever trust anything? I say again, Yeah, especially if she
figures it out herself. And I never like come clean. Oh,
speaking of coming clean, it's time to introduce everybody to
(03:38):
our mutual favorite part of our show, super producer Casey
Pegram Casey, I've got to ask, when did you figure
out that the tooth Fairy was not in fact a
supernatural creature. I think I figured it out pretty early
on and kind of kept up the illusions a little
(03:59):
bit very parents, well, my own financial benefits, That's what
I'm saying, because once you stop believing, then the cash
dries up. What was your exchange rate for a tooth
if you don't mind me as, I want to say,
maybe five or ten bucks? Pretty rich. And if you
were a child in the United States, in you got
(04:23):
an average of three dollars and seventy cents per lost tooth.
And that's twenty jump over last year's rates rate of
three dollars a tooth. And it's interesting too because it's
obviously an average. So uh, some kids might get a
twenty spot for their tooth, some kids might just get
a buck. And I believe that that was tracked regionally
(04:43):
and that it was found that in the South where
we live, that's where the tooth fairy was the stingiest, uh,
And I believe up north is where they were a
bit more generous. Yeah, so this is weird. I'm not
gonna say who in my family. But there was also
a practice that I thought was normal, wherein it was
(05:05):
kind of a surprise or a gamble to see how
much money the tooth fairy would leave you, because our
tooth fairy in our family was like pretty uh, pretty discerning,
and so some teeth would get more money because they
were better somehow, like a canine tooth at a point
was considered you know, a nice it's like tulips. It
(05:27):
was like tulips, except with just this invisible fairy creature. Yeah.
And speaking of like, you know, tooth fairy money as
some sort of financial indicator, Delta Dental I believe we
actually go through through our company, UM, a dental insurance company,
actually tracked the average exchange for a tooth from two
(05:48):
thousands up to two thousand sixteen, and they correlated it
with the changes in the SNP five market and found
that it was pretty close. Oh wow, interesting and this
is super interesting, man. This is a lot of this
is from a fabulous article from our friends over at
Mental flaws UM. The tooth fairy inspired this researcher to
(06:08):
come up with something called tooth fairy science. Do you
want to talk about that, man, Tooth fairy science. Yeah,
it's important, but it's not near as whimsical as it sounds.
An Air Force flight surgeon skeptic and critic of alternative
medicine named Dr Harriet Hall coined this term to essentially
describe the importance of making sure some event, object, or
(06:32):
phenomena is real before attempting to study it. That's right,
because the example here is if you are studying, uh,
the amount of money the tooth fairy leaves and averaging
it out. Um, you might think that you're just studying
the behavior of to the tooth fairy or tooth fairies. Um,
but what you're actually studying is the behavior of parents.
(06:53):
And so if you are studying a thing that doesn't
really exist, there might be another thing that is actually
doing the thing that you're studying that you even considered.
And so it's just an important way to create good
data and also to plan good studies. Yeah, and this
is interesting because we're we're looking at so many cultural
things that describe the tooth fairy. One of the things
(07:18):
that I think is fascinating it's when something we were
focusing on for this episode is the origin of the
tooth fairy. Because there there's so many things like Santa Claus, Christmas, trees,
the Easter bunny, things of that nature that we accept
growing up as normal, normal things. You know. Even though
uh many of these will be tied to a religious practice,
(07:41):
secular kids practice them too because Christmas or Hanukah. That
that kind of stuff is just cool, you know what
I mean? And what I think will surprise a lot
of people here is that the origins of the tooth
fairy are at least the two fairs we understand it
in the US, the origins are fairly recent. We can
(08:01):
trace back ancient tales of tooth related rites of passage.
That stuff is really fascinating, like tooth tossing, the throwing
of the teeth, which is appears across several different cultures,
which is really interesting. The vikings did it, especially baby teeth? Yeah, yeah,
(08:21):
the offering of a tooth to a rat because it
would make your like a rat or a rodent of
some sort, because it was thought to ensure that the
child's teeth would grow strong. And that's really interesting when
we get into the modern day tooth fairy myth, or
at least the story that likely was the cause of
it um where the tooth fairy is in fact a rodent. Yes, yes,
(08:46):
it's true. So we know that, at least in Europe,
The ritual of of how to handle one's shed baby
teeth is global. There are just different rituals around it.
Like you said, nold, Uh. This tradition in your up
at least dates back to the earliest written records in
Norse and Northern European cultures, and during the Middle Ages,
(09:08):
there were superstitions about children's teeth, like you had to
burn your baby teeth to save a child from hardship
in the afterlife, or um, you would wear children's teeth
to bring you good luck in battle, or you would
bury teeth to hide them from witches. And it's interesting
(09:29):
because back then it was thought that if a witch
were to get ahold of your teeth, the which would
have power over you. It's kind of weird, right, it
is a little weird. So what's this? Uh, what's this
original story? Because we can kind of trace it back, right,
it's neat, but it's really cool because it kind of
incorporates some of the things we were just talking about.
So it turns out that the tooth fairy. The origins
(09:49):
of the tooth fairy date back to eighteenth century France,
when a fairy tale called oh boy trying to do
Casey proud la bon pet la bon petit slowly, so
he and what does that translate to, sir, It's like
the good little mouse. Oh, it's the good little mouse.
And it's the good little casey on the case. So
(10:11):
this is the story of le bon petit, the good mouse.
There is a an evil king who imprisons a good queen,
and the queen is sort of like a you know,
a snow white type figure. She can talk to the
animals and all that, and so she gets a little
mouse to help her out of this jam. That's right,
(10:33):
that's right. And the mouse, luckily for her, it turns
out not to just be an intelligent, plucky little rodent. Also,
the mouse is secretly a fairy and once revealed to
be a member of the fair folk or of faye uh,
the former mouse frees the queen and then knocks out
all of the king's teeth. Yis, at which point, as
(10:55):
because she would naturally do in fairy tale logic, he
hides these teeth under the king's pillow and then eventually,
as the king killed. So that's not creepy at all. Well,
we could do, you know, we I'm sure everyone listening
this has heard stories before about how much more morbid
and graphic the original version of fairy Tales are, you
(11:17):
know what I mean. So don't let the patina of
Disney feel good y fool you about the true nature
fairy tales. But that's fantastic, right, So this goes back
to what we're saying earlier about the cultural thing with rodents,
rodents and teeth and the sacrifice of teeth, the offering
up of teeth and the pillow even exactly. Yeah, so
(11:43):
let's fast forward a little bit to an especially pivotal
article that was written in nineteen eight. That's right, because
one of the earliest mentions of the tooth Fairy, which
that that is not the language used in in the play, right, No,
it's it's the cute little mouse fairy, right, their teeth
involved in the pillow, and that that kind of cements
(12:05):
the whole mythology of the tooth Fairy, but doesn't really
have a name yet. So in a column in the
Chicago Daily Tribune in nineteen o eight, uh called Household Hints,
somebody writes in and suggests that, um, I'm gonna quote it,
and this is also cribbing this from this mental flass
article that has a list of unexpected things about the
tooth Fairy. Um many a refractory child will allow a
(12:28):
loose tooth to be removed if he knows about the
tooth Fairy. If he takes his little tooth and puts
it under the pillow when he goes to bed, the
tooth Fairy will come in the night and take it away,
and in its place will leave some little gift. And
then you've got to play. That comes out in the
late twenties by Esther Watkins called The Tooth Fairy, and
(12:49):
that's history. And this was a rerelease of that original
French story, The Good Little Mouse. It was in English.
It was in ninety seven specifically, and this is where
the mouse Fairy character becomes cemented with some of the
imagery that we have seen before, the wings in particular,
(13:09):
and they're they're scattered references afterwards in around this time
to the Tooth Fairy in the first half of the
twentieth century, but it doesn't really hit its boom. It's
Malcolm Gladwell esque tipping point until after World War Two.
Because one of the most popular stories in call Your's
(13:31):
magazine in mentions the Tooth Fairy and this, you know,
this makes it a little bit more legitimate. But from
what what we found, the tooth fairy didn't even enter
uh in encyclopedia until what the late seventies, a very
(13:51):
modern American creation. M hmm. Yeah, it's much more recent
than you might think. And according to some who have
researched the history of the tooth fairies, such as Michael
Hingston over at Salon, we can't overestimate the amount of
influence corporations had over the creation of tooth fairy. So
(14:16):
we said, so, like, you know, the old story was
Santa Claus before the Coca Cola Santa. The appearance of
Santa vary widely. He might be really skinny, his costume differed.
But once a soda company made this sort of uh pleasant,
ruddy cheeked guy who's always wearing the same costume, they
(14:38):
sort of codified this icon, first in the US and
now around the world. That's how people think of Santa
Claus often. So he puts the finger at a another
corporate entity. That sort of solidified the idea of the
tooth fairy. And you can find this article it's called
Don't Tell the Kids. The real history of the tooth fairy.
(14:58):
In this he delves into the work of perhaps the
most influential, most prominent tooth fairy scholar scholar, Yeah, tooth
fairy scholars, Rosemary Wells, right, exactly, Rosemary Wells. And she
saw what we've been seeing that the practice of you know, um,
(15:19):
dealing with teeth in a ritualistic way, I guess for
lack of about Yeah, I know, was a thing across cultures,
but there was precious little known about the the origins
of the tooth fairy. And she's the one who kind
of dug in and found a lot of this stuff
and really went to town. She interviewed all kinds of folks,
anthropologists and parents and kids, and came out with a
series of articles, um to get to the heart of
(15:42):
this mythical creature, the root character, the root, indeed the
root that was a joke from a previous episode. Yeah yeah,
yeah yeah. So she dove into this and became known
as like the global expert on these traditions, the evolution
(16:03):
of this in the zeitgeist. She even opened up the
tooth Fairy Museum in her home in Deerfield, Michigan. So
people who study this will tell you that there are
several factors that led to the tooth fairies um agreed
upon depiction here in the US. And first we should
mention for a long time, no one agreed with the
(16:24):
tooth fairy looked like right, that's right. It wasn't really
a prominent feature, which just kind of a winged, tiny
creature a thing that happened. Yeah, you know, especially since
the origins were it being a literal mouse, right, right,
So this changes a little bit the animation giant Disney
starts using fairies and fairy godmothers in the nineteen fifties
(16:48):
in a lot of their films like Tinkerbell and Cinderella's right,
So you get this image of like, this is what
a fairy. It's not a long jump to just insert
that visual that Disney provided the public consciousness with and
there you got your tooth fairy. Yeah, it's like, hey see,
this is what a fairy looks like. Now that one
is just a tooth themed fairy lack of I've always
(17:11):
pictured the tooth Fairies being a Tinkerbell esque figure. Yeah
you know what, Uh, I'm right there with you, man.
There's there's another thing that happens here right around the
same time, because we said the tooth fairy didn't really
blow up till post World War two US. Right, that's
an economic boom, there's an increase in prosperity. If you're
living through the Great Depression, you might not have a
(17:32):
nickel to give a kid, Absolutely not, that would be
a frivolous use of a nickel. And then secondly, at
least as it's argued in Forbes magazine, uh, the child
centered view of the American family doesn't really come into
play until post World War two. Now again this is Forbes,
but the author argues that after World War Two it
(17:54):
became normal for parents to cater to their children, to
kind of dote on them, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, before
they have them, like working in the fields or whatever.
You know. There's an interesting idea here too, which is
equating a painful, scary experience for children to some sort
of reward, like you'd be brave, get that tooth out,
(18:14):
you got a dollar coming your way or a nickel
or whatever. Super capitalist not to mention, you can even
double down on that and make it about like hey,
if you brush your teeth thrill, well, the tooth fair
will give you more money or whatever. You know, nice parenting,
parenting jiu jitsu. That's a great move. I'm impressed with you,
(18:34):
so we I think we already taught. Now she knows
I'm a dirty liar, so you know nothing. I say. Well, ever,
stand again. You tell her you're a dirty liar who
kept her teeth clean. It might be a Jack Nicholson
moment for you, like in that what was what's name
that film? A Few Good Men? You can't handle the tooth.
That's funny, that's cute. I like that. Speaking of handling
(18:55):
the teeth, that's another part of the whole Rigamar role.
Is you gotta kind of sneak in like a thief
in the night and and abscond with the tooth from
under your sleeping child's pillow and then shove it somewhere.
I have a drawer full of baby teeth somewhere. I
always pictured you as that kind of guy. Yeah, speaking
of that, though, you told me a really interesting story
about someone who stumbled upon a cash of teeth in
(19:18):
a building, in the walls of a building here in Georgia. Yes,
that's true. In October of this year in Valdosta, Georgia,
which is in South Georgia for people unfamiliar with the state.
There were some construction workers who were at the T B.
Converse building and they were trying to prepare the place
for the essentially trying to renovate it, and they wanted
(19:42):
to get it ready for a new commercial tenant. And
that's when they discovered around one thousand individual teeth buried
in a wall on the second floor. But the tooth
ferry were in fact real. Yeah, I know, you're just
shuddering your way through this one. I appreciate you sticking,
staying without a taking one for the team. But that
would be like the tooth fairies, like Burrow, like Den.
(20:03):
Perhaps that's what they do with the teeth, right, that's
the to me as a kid, isn't it. What the
hell is that fairy doing with those teeth? Like the
bone collector right right? Like the bone Club any I mean,
if you think about it, this is a weirdly common trope,
like Cereal mascots, you know, like the Lucky Charms guy.
He's just taking all these charms. What's he doing with them?
(20:26):
It's freakish, you know. He's also really skinny too, so
he's always not eating at all. Yeah, yeah, and it's
not like the tooth fairy is putting the teeth in
its mouth and getting a bigger smile. Though that's a
great idea for a horror story, and there is in
fact a spooky tooth fairy. I believe, not to mention
a silly tooth fairy starring the Rock and then subsequent
I believe, straight to video sequels Larry the Cable Guy.
(20:49):
So I would love to see Tom Waits's tooth fairy.
It's like a haggard old wizard with like tiny wings
and he comes in. He's like, gotta keep quiet, Mr Pocket. Yes,
you guys haven't seen Tom Waits in the ballot of
Busters Cross. We gotta let it go. Absolute delight. So
(21:16):
I feel like we we have learned a lot here.
The tooth Fairy is, at least the way we understand
it is so much more recent. It's that prospollination of
this mouse that sneaks into a kid's bedroom, and then
this general idea of the quote unquote good fairy. Right,
we just sort of smushed them together America style melt
(21:39):
melt there we go, Yeah, we fond dude it and
then it caught on and spread like wildfire. I feel
like there's also an economic aspect to this too, you
know what I mean. It's not like put your teeth
under your pillow and you get to spend more time
with your loved ones. It's put your teeth on your pillow.
(22:00):
Here's three dollars and seventy cents. Yeah, and and those
dollars in nickels and tens and twenties, and guy, I
wonder for any kids ever got a hundred? Surely, surely, yeah,
somewhere must be nice anyway. Yeah, add up to two
hundred and fifty six million dollars um. That is is bonkers. Yeah,
(22:21):
and there's okay. I found the quote that I wanted
to I wanted to us to hear about the economic part.
And I appreciate you putting in that huge number, that
statistic for us. So, going back to Christina and Kilgrove's
article in Forbes, she says the tooth Fairy holds a
shorter and less visible pedigree than Santa Claus, but her
(22:42):
macro economic function in today's society differs only in degree.
Santa Clauss promises pre monetary goodness gets you barbies or
a Rambo doll. The tooth fairies promises more modern anything,
even your own body, can be turned into gold. That,
in its final reductive wisdom, is precisely the vaunted magic
(23:04):
of free enterprise. That is dark and spot on. Actually, man,
do you want to rattle off a couple of these,
uh other maybe non monetary traditions at the end here
or should we just leave it with that amazing quote?
I think, I don't know. Let's maybe we can find
something a little less dark dark. Yeah, let's talk about
some of the other traditions that persist. Let's travel around
(23:27):
the world. So we've been to the United States, but
we talked about we we talked about tooth tossing, right, Yeah,
it's true in countries like Turkey and even Greece or Mexico. Um,
kids throw their teeth onto the roof. Why, I don't know,
(23:48):
that's where they belong. Good, good luck, I guess I'm
not sure. Ben. You mentioned something earlier about how it
would uh maybe encourage healthy growth of adult teeth. But
in the Philippines, Korea, India, and Vietnam, only the lower
teeth get tossed. Oh, I remember this, because the upper
(24:10):
teeth go on the floor and the idea is that
through I guess, sympathetic magic or attraction, the new tooth
will grow toward the old one. Smart makes sense, right,
it does make sense. Uh. And then there are other
tooth tossing things where sometimes the kid will yell out
a wish while they're tossing a tooth, which makes I
(24:31):
guess makes more sense to me for some reason, because
it feels like an exchange, very instant exchange. Well, I
don't have a tooth to throw, Ben, but I wish
we could just keep talking about teeth forever. But I
don't think you make it. You're shuddering at this point.
You're you're literally you're in a cold sweat. Yeah, but
we're doing this for the ridiculous historians. I'm doing it
for you all throughout Central Asia. If you have a
(24:54):
kid that loses a tooth, remember it's traditional to put
the tooth into some fat and feed it to a dog.
Please don't try that. I don't know how a dog
would digest a tooth. This is done because the idea
is that the grown up tooth that replaces it will
be as strong as a dog's tooth, and if there's
no dog around, bury it by a tree so that
the new tooth and strong roots. That's that's that's a
(25:15):
quote from a mental flossol. That's wonderful. That's wonderful. So
do you have kids, how did you handle the tooth
fairy growing up? You know what I mean? I'd love
to hear from people who didn't really have it as
a thing in their house, because not everybody does. Absolutely,
Or if you're a parent, how do you feel about
the tooth fairy? Lie? Let us know. You can write
(25:36):
to us a ridiculous at how stuff works dot com,
where you can hit us up on our Facebook group,
the Ridiculous Historians, where we just have a good old
time hanging out by the Internet fire, you know, warming ourselves,
burning our teeth, drinking hot cocoa together with the other
ridiculous historians that hang out. There's a lot of fun.
Casey gets on, Jonathan strict On, the the quister gets on,
or as you like to call him, Ben the Quizzler,
(25:58):
just to take him down to pat you gotta take
a down when he gets big. He is a hotty boy.
Sometimes he gets big, a little too big, a little big,
little big. So thanks also to Alex Williams, you can
pose our track thanks to you, Noel Brown. Uh and
it sounds like you're doing a pretty solid job navigating
the ethically fraught path of parenthood. Well, you know, when
(26:19):
it all came out, she definitely didn't hate me or
distrust me, So I guess I'm doing okay. We'll see
you next time, Fox,
Ridiculous History News
Hosts And Creators
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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