I am well aware of the tooth fairy tradition, because we have grandchildren ranging in age from five to twelve. Straight Dope observes that teething rituals date to ancient times when witches were thought to use pieces of the body to cast curses. There were differing methods of preventing this. Some cultures threw the tooth up to the sun, threw it over a roof, or it could be fed to an animal such as a mouse. The tooth  sometimes also could be buried, hidden, swallowed or burned. The reason a mouse (or perhaps a rat) was fed the tooth was the belief that the new teeth coming in would resemble those of the animal, and the teeth of mice were considered to strong and sharp. There was a French fairy tale about a “tooth mouse,” and that might have been the origin. The tooth fairy exchanging the lost tooth for something of value didn’t become fashionable until the early 1900s. Esther Arnold wrote a play called The Tooth Fairy in 1927 and Lee Rogow published a children’s story called The Tooth Fairy in 1949. The tooth fairy typically left a dime in the 1950s and two dollars by the 1990s. In my experience inflation must have really kicked in since then.

I think my favorite part of the write up in Straight Dope (proving, I expect, how easily I am entertained) is the ending. “And that’s the tooth, the whole tooth, and nothing but the tooth.”