Who Owns the Tooth Fairy?

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Before we begin, if you're listening to this episode with children or with children even in the room, please take a close look at the title and episode description before continuing.

We're going to be talking about the subjects mentioned there very matter-of-factly: wink, wink, nudge, nudge, elbow, elbow, ho, ho, ho.

Please go check.

I find myself at a certain stage of life.

Is it Wiggly?

Mm-hmm.

What's gonna happen when you lose it?

Um, the tooth fairy is gonna get it.

My children are losing their baby teeth.

What do you do with your teeth?

I put them in my tooth pillow.

And what happens in the morning?

The tooth fairy takes it, and then I get, she gives me money and she flies away.

The amount they get for each tooth, a dollar, is what I got as a kid, and the tooth pillow they used was mine too.

But the questions they have are all their own.

I wonder what all the tooth fairies, if they have a ward to live in.

Like a town or a wood or a country or something, like we do.

Yeah, totally.

I feel like they might like make their houses out of teeth.

These would take a long time because they're big.

Pixies are the tiny ones.

Do fairies have their own tooth fairies?

That is a great

question.

You know, I actually kind of think they do.

They're six and eight, and I must have thought about things like this when I was their age, though I seriously doubt I thought anything as good as do fairies have a tooth fairy?

These days, I still have questions about the tooth fairy, but they've changed, gotten more grown up.

What do you think the tooth fairy looks like?

Fairy are like natural items.

They're not like weird weird

things that just like float around wearing big poofy skirts all the time.

What the tooth fairy looks like is a grown-up question because there's no right answer.

I definitely don't know what I thought the tooth fairy looked like.

I don't remember.

Yeah, I did in my mind all the time.

There are illustrations of tooth fairies in plenty of kids' books, and in 2010, a Hollywood movie called The Tooth Fairy decided it looked like a tutu wearing Dwayne the Rock Johnson.

Who are you?

I'm the tooth fairy.

Oh yeah.

That movie also had the incredible tagline.

You can't handle the tooth.

But generally speaking, you can picture the tooth fairy however you want.

So here's maybe the most grown-up question of all.

How'd the tooth fairy pull that off?

How'd the tooth fairy, a widely known and beloved magical being already embedded in children's inner lives, escape being sold to us in a thousand different ways.

How has it not been given a name, an outfit, a backstory, a TV show, a theme park, a cinematic universe, or an endless line of merchandise?

I mean, how is it that we don't even know what it does with all those teeth?

This is Decoder Ring.

I'm Willoughby Haskin.

We pride ourselves on being grounded rational beings, but flitting amongst us is a mystery.

The Tooth Fairy is a flying piece of folklore, alive and well in the 21st century, handed down from parent to child, like pretty much however we want.

In this episode, with the help of Tinkerbell, Santa Claus, and some savvy humans who are trying to exploit this untapped piece of intellectual property, we're going to look at this strange creature, its origins, its persistence, and its remarkable resistance to commercialization in order to try and extract some grown-up meaning from what we think of as a childhood ritual.

So, today, on Decoder Ring, how has the Tooth Fairy stayed so free?

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Losing a tooth is a universal human experience, but the tooth fairy is not.

And Amanda Beeler learned that as a child.

I came running downstairs.

I'd lost my tooth.

Will the tooth fairy come?

Will the tooth fairy come?

And my mom said, of course, we'll make sure you put it in the bag.

We'll take it home.

At the time, Amanda and her mom Selby were visiting a friend from Brazil.

And the woman looked at her and said, What's the tooth fairy?

And my mom said, What do you mean, what's the tooth fairy?

Amanda's mom selby asked the friend what had happened to her baby teeth instead and the friend said she'd tossed them outside while reciting a poem soon selby was asking everyone we lived in rochester minnesota which is where the male clinic is it's got a huge international population and so she had access to people from all over even at home and started asking people can i ask you a silly question do you remember when you were a child what you did with your teeth when selby asked this people who'd been looking at her skeptically would smile and remember and answer.

And she just started writing them down.

Selby ultimately gathered all the rituals she found out about in a children's book.

So my mother would be over the moon to have this conversation.

But my mother has Alzheimer's disease.

She's 81.

And she's had it for a long time.

But she has her book on her bedside table.

It's called Throw Your Tooth on the Roof.

Tooth traditions from around the world.

And I read it to my own children.

In your hand and a big hole in your mouth.

It happens to everyone, everywhere, all over the world.

Look, look, my tooth fell out.

My tooth fell out.

But what happens next?

What in the world do you do with your tooth?

So throw your tooth on the roof, obviously, is a big one because they chose that as the title.

But there are many other traditions, too.

In a bunch of countries, upper teeth are thrown on the roof, lower teeth are buried in the ground to make your teeth, your top teeth grow down and you're straight, and your lower teeth grow up.

Baby teeth are also buried.

They're thrown into fires and towards the sun.

And very often they're taken by animals.

Makes sense for a mouse or a rat because it's somebody who's got good strong teeth that's going to take your tooth.

I put my tooth under my pillow and wait for El Raton to leave me some money.

He's a mouse.

In Europe specifically, the tooth mouse can be traced back to at least the 17th century, a folkloric ancestor of La Petit Sori, the little mouse who takes children's teeth in France to this day, and also of El Raton Beres, who does the honors in most Spanish-speaking countries.

In fact, the tooth theory is the norm in just a handful of places, mostly English-speaking and including Canada, where the writer Michael Hinkston is from.

It's not a foot, it's not a finger, it's not a piece of clothing.

Michael has always been captivated by teeth.

There's something about a tooth being like this part of a person that detaches and then like lives lives on that I found so fascinating.

He started researching teeth, which promptly led him to the tooth fairy.

So I think the surprising thing for most people, certainly the surprising thing for me when I started looking into this, is the tooth fairy is a pretty recent entry to sort of these folklore figures, these like mythological holiday-related creatures.

The tooth fairy basically dates back to the turn of the 20th century.

So she combines two different figures that you see in Europe and other places that date back much further.

One is that animal with strong teeth, like a mouse or a rat, but it could be a dog or a beaver.

The other is the fairy.

Fairies go back centuries, but they could be impish, naughty, frightening.

And that's not the tooth fairy.

She's a good fairy.

Tinkerbell.

Hey, where are you?

And around the turn of the century, The good fairy was having a bit of a moment.

J.M.

Barry's Peter Pan, which introduced the world to the beam of light known as Tinkerbell, was first written as a play and staged in 1904.

Around the same time, romantic-looking fairies were appearing in paintings and poems and illustrations.

In 1908, the term tooth fairy appeared for the first time in print in a domestic advice column in an American newspaper as a tip on how to get stubborn children to part with their teeth.

Tell them about the tooth fairy and set aside some nickels.

The

American twist is money.

Like Americans introduced money to the equation.

Tooth rituals don't have to be transactional.

Children throw their tooth on the roof so their new tooth will grow in straight and strong.

But in America...

It doesn't mean anything unless you also get cash.

The money may help explain why, after sporadic mentions through the 1910s and 20s, the tooth fairy really took off at the tail end of the Great Depression, when families would have been able to afford to shell out for a tooth.

It's also when the good fairy got an exceptionally powerful boost from a hype mouse named Mickey.

As I live and breathe, a fairy.

In 1940, Disney released Pinocchio, in which the blue fairy, a glimmer of light who becomes a full-sized blonde woman with wings and a sparkly blue gown, brings the puppet to life.

She was followed by Cinderella's fairy godmother, and in 1953, Disney's animated Peter Pan.

Oh, look, a five-month, a pixie, amazing.

Moviegoers are starting to become familiar with this benevolent, fairy-like figure who can make wishes and dreams come true.

And the tooth fairy emerges as a result.

By the 1960s, the tooth fairy was just about as established as it is now, though a survey from the 1970s found that 25% of people thought the tooth fairy was male.

50 years later, even if most people now imagine the tooth fairy as a Tinkerbell clone, they still don't have to.

A kid could say they thought the tooth fairy looked like a polka dot monster, and the grown-up on hand would probably tell them they had a great imagination or just play along.

In fact, adults playing along is a big part of this tradition.

And sometimes it can go wrong.

So, according to my mom, I started losing my teeth in first grade, and almost immediately, I started asking a lot of questions about the Tooth Fairy.

Christina Katarucci is a senior writer at Slate.

I was asking, like, well, yeah, what's her name?

How does she do it?

Basically, like, what's her deal?

So, Christina was encouraged to write the Tooth Fairy a letter.

When she woke up in the morning, there was a response from a fairy named Tooth Lula, written in delicate, shaky fairy handwriting.

Tooth Lula and Christina began a correspondence.

One time, Christina even left her a present, a cute little fruit eraser.

If you were ever a kid, especially in the 90s, you know how valuable little like novelty erasers were.

So it was actually kind of a precious object that I was giving her.

But Christina and Tooth Lula's back and forth was interrupted when Christina read a book, For Kids, that just came out and said, The Tooth Fairy Isn't Real.

I read read this book and was sort of astounded by this revelation and thought,

you know, you don't believe everything you read, so let me try to figure this out for myself.

She decided to do an experiment.

So I went into my parents' room specifically with the intention of trying to find this little token that I had given the tooth fairy.

Sure enough, in my mom's jewelry box, there was the little eraser.

If I remember correctly, it was shaped like like an apple.

So, you know, that was a big disappointment.

But in my head, I was like, okay,

this is an incontrovertible proof.

There could still be a way to explain this away.

You know, maybe the tooth fairy didn't have room for my eraser in her bag, and my mom didn't want me to feel bad.

So I said, okay, let me try one more thing.

She wrote the tooth fairy another note, but this time she didn't tell anyone.

I put the note under my pillow in the morning.

I checked and it was still there.

And I, you know, like my heart fell.

I don't know how I made it through that whole day, but I remember I didn't confront my parents until that night.

They were tucking me into bed and I was like, I have to ask you something.

You know,

I think you're the tooth fairy.

I don't think the tooth fairy is real.

And here's why.

And my mom and dad were like, you know, you're right.

We're so sorry, But, like, you know, I hope you appreciate the magic of it.

It's almost one of my strongest memories from my childhood bedroom was like sitting in my bed and having this conversation with my parents.

And then my mom tells me now that she could just see the gears turning in my head.

And probably like one minute into the conversation, I go,

oh my God, what about the Easter bunny and Santa?

Here comes Santa Claus, here comes Santa Claus, right down Santa Claus Lane.

The Tooth Fairy is, of course, part of an exclusive club, a trio whose other members young Christina just named.

And though they share a lot of qualities, you can't just go around saying Santa's got polka dots or that his name is Tooth Lula.

There's so much attention paid and detail fleshed out about like all the questions a kid might have to try to disprove Santa, like, how does he get into a house without a chimney?

How does he make it around the world in one night?

Why do some kids not get presents?

And so I think that helps kids believe in it more because you're like, oh, okay, you're telling me that you recognize that those questions exist and there's an explanation.

But if Santa is much more clearly and satisfyingly delineated than the Tooth Fairy, he wasn't always.

When we come back, we're going to take a look at how Santa became Santa to get some insight into why it hasn't happened to the Tooth Fairy and if it still could.

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So before we continue, I feel that I have to tell you, I do not have personal experience with the magic of Santa Claus because I don't celebrate Christmas.

But you don't have to have personal experience with Santa to know a lot about him.

Santa, like you literally close your eyes.

We all see the same thing.

Isn't that stunning?

Penny Reset is the author of Christmas in America, a history.

Well into the 1800s, Christmas was not as we now know it.

It wasn't even a national holiday.

Back then, America was a new country full of immigrants with different traditions and churches.

Puritans banned Christmas because it wasn't scriptural.

For many, it was an occasion for carousing and drunkenness.

People did not have Christmas trees, and there was certainly no Santa Claus in the mix.

Santa Claus has got a really long history.

and also a very short history.

So the long history starts him off as being St.

Nicholas of Barry.

Saint Nicholas supposedly performed miracles back in the 3rd and 4th century AD, but by the late Middle Ages, he'd been adapted and adopted by various European cultures as a gift-bringing folk character who would visit in the winter.

Versions of this figure made it to the new world.

But despite going by the names Saint Nick, Chris Kringle, and the Dutch Sinterklos, they were not chubby, jovial bearded men in red suits.

One of these figures, for example, was called Belsnickel, and he was found among German immigrants in Pennsylvania.

Belsnickel wore a furry pelt and carried a sack and a switch that he would use on kids who couldn't recite a Bible verse.

So, here's a character that is a fantasy or a folk tale or folklore, and he exists in kind of hazy ways in various parts of the nation, but not in all of it.

And we start to see this: what is it, a felt need, Is it an impulse to

envision

this character?

This envisioning began with a poem.

Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.

A visit from St.

Nick was written by Clement Clark Moore, a member of New York City's literary elite in the early 1820s.

He just shows up in Clement Clark Moore's poem as this little elf.

He's short, he's rotund, he's cheerful.

He's a little old driver, so lively and quick.

He's impish.

Despite being tiny, he uses a chimney.

He's got Donner and Blitzen, and he arrives on Christmas Eve.

But even as this poem began running annually in newspapers across the country, St.

Nick was still ill-defined to the point that he could have a sleigh pulled by turkeys, as he did in an 1858 illustration in Harper's magazine.

That changed just a few years later, though, thanks to some other illustrations published in Harper's by the famous cartoonist Thomas Nast.

It's Nast who creates this kind of full-size portrait

of Santa Claus and who's no longer an elf.

He's got his own elves.

Nast began to draw Santa in the 1860s, and the images were so popular, he would go on on to draw Santa for the next 20 years.

Thomas Ness had this wonderfully creative mind and really loved home.

And I think he had a great deal of fun creating this Santa Claus that we now look at as our Santa.

One of his drawings is called Santa and His Works.

It's a large illustration with a number of inset circles showing Santa getting up to various now familiar activities.

And it shows Santa Claus checking a list.

You know, he's got a telescope looking for good boys and good girls.

As Penny and I spoke, I peppered her with questions about when things that we think of as canonically Santa first appeared.

When did he start to live in the North Pole?

When did he get a Mrs.

Claus?

When did he start wearing red?

Penny explained that he picked up all of these qualities in the late 19th century as various creative adults and business people elaborated on this myth meant for children.

Even so, she says it wasn't until the 1920s and 30s that his image became completely locked in.

And that was thanks to magazine covers by Norman Rockwell and other illustrators and a series of famous Coca-Cola ads.

And even after that, the myth was still growing.

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer didn't appear until 1939, when the department store Montgomery Ward was looking for a draw during the Great Depression.

And so one of their admin writes this story and they give out the story of Rudolph as a, you know, as a freebie for people who come into the store to buy things.

Less than a decade later, the movie Miracle on 34th Street suggested a Macy's department store Santa was the real deal.

And that Santa was already worried about the holidays' debasement.

That's what I've been fighting against for years, the way they commercialize Christmas.

Yeah, there's a lot of badisms floating around this world, but one of the worst is commercialism.

Makeup up, makeup up.

The tooth fairy is never going to be Santa Claus.

It's never going to be the centerpiece of the nation's biggest, most revered, most lucrative annual domestic and religious holiday.

But in the 2000s, commercialization finally came for it anyway.

Thanks to one company in particular.

Can you believe that a childhood character known by millions worldwide has not yet been licensed?

We'll be right back.

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From the minute I noticed the Tooth Fairy was relatively uncommercialized, I've had this kind of dual reaction.

I'm grateful that she's still so unfettered and very surprised that that's the case.

In fact, the first thing I did when I started thinking about all of this was Google commercializing the tooth fairy because I couldn't believe someone hadn't tried to do it.

And lo and behold, someone had.

And someone else had noticed.

My name is Susan Lin.

Susan is a psychologist and the author of a number of books, including Who's Raising the Kids, Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children.

She's also a puppeteer and a ventriloquist.

Sometimes I think that when I'm in the hospital, it's because I'm bad.

Going to the hospital doesn't have anything to do with being bad or being good.

It has to do with being sick.

That's her on a 1987 episode of Mr.

Rogers' Neighborhood, doing what she does, using puppets to talk with kids about serious issues.

In the 1990s, she was becoming concerned with an issue that hit close to home.

When my daughter was in fourth grade, their spring concert was just an evening of Disney music.

For me, the idea that the school

was

teaching a body of music that she was sold every single day.

That's not what school is supposed to be for.

I was the only parent who was upset about this.

As someone who sang a whole new world from Aladdin for her sixth grade graduation, I wouldn't have been that upset about this either.

But it distressed Susan.

She started to notice just how blatantly companies were milking kids for money, encroaching on every aspect of their imagination.

It's not that the characters are necessarily bad.

It's the business model.

The commercialization of children's lives has been linked to childhood obesity, eating disorders, precocious sexuality, youth violence, family stress, the erosion of creative play,

and the acquisition of materialistic values, the false notion

that the things we buy will make us sustainably happy.

And so she became the founding director of a nonprofit called the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood, which is now called Fair Play.

In 2013, the organization received a tip.

We were anonymously sent this sales video

for

a brand called the Real Tooth Fairies.

What if this moment of real-life magic that kids and parents already buy into could be captured in a tooth fairy brand that girls love?

The video was meant for potential investors, not the general public.

And the gist is that the tooth fairy is a slam dunk, a hugely lucrative idea hiding in plain sight, one that has a giant head start on becoming a mega brand.

With a target audience of 10 million U.S.

girls ages 6 to 10 who lose 20 teeth, that translates to 200 million tooth fairy moments.

And biology guarantees that will never stop.

The video includes clips of smiling little girls with missing teeth, some parent testimonials, and an interview with a former Disney executive about the brand's massive potential.

It also boasts of offering hundreds of licensing opportunities and a sticky online experience.

It includes games, virtual shopping, and a social community where users make friends, exchange presents, and rate each other's castle rooms.

Needless to say, whoever sent this video to the campaign for a commercial-free childhood knew what they were doing.

The nonprofit began to look into the Real Two theories, which was launched in 2011 by a married couple.

They declined to speak with me for this episode, but they had a lot of experience in children's entertainment and with children.

One was a veteran of the children's toy jaggernaut Hasbro, and the other is a licensed social worker and psychotherapist who had consulted for Fisher Price and written more than two dozen children's books for Disney.

The company had already raised $2.9 million and had a website which they said had reached millions of users.

They were trying to raise $5 million more dollars with the aim of reaching 30 million users by the end of 2014.

They had trademarked scores of real-world products and counted executives from companies including Disney and Mattel as consultants.

They would also later attach Hillary Duff to an animated film project.

Twinkle?

Are you in there?

I want to fly with you.

Twinkle is one of six main fairies who all have impossibly big eyes and heads that sit atop tall, slim, glittery, bee-winged, begowned bodies.

This is going to sound strange if you're not already familiar with contemporary girls' toys, but the doll's sexualized, airbrushed physical aesthetic was paired with a stated interest in math and science and computer coding.

STEM skills have become a pretty standard way to insulate a toy from any critique about over-sexualized or unrealistic beauty standards.

And in fact, back in 2013, the real Tooth Fairies villain, who has since been changed, was a short, plump, glasses-wearing woman named Stapella who didn't shave her legs.

Like, that was a really big character beat, her unshaven legs.

Anyway, the six kindness performing science-loving fairies all reside in Fairyland, where they work hard answering earthy kids' letters while manufacturing them presents that would presumably also have been for sale on the website.

At center is the Present Popper, powered by Glow Magic.

It pops out the perfect present for Earthy Kids for every occasion.

Susan Lin and her colleagues took all of this in and decided that though the Real Tooth Fairies was a fledgling company, it should be taken seriously.

They launched a PR campaign with Susan writing an op-ed for the Huffington Post titled, Save the Tooth Fairy.

It was easy to horrify people with this particular campaign, which was, you know, so blatantly about greed.

The story, which does have a real you can't make this up quality, was aggregated across the feminist blogosphere, covered by the New York Times, and disparaged by the comedians on NPR's Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me.

I would rather have my kids' teeth rot out of their head.

It seemed that plenty of adults who were inured to a certain amount of commercialization in children's lives were not inured to this.

It all amounted to a big burst of negative attention for what was a new company.

Attention the Real Tooth Aries has never generated again.

It's been almost 10 years.

The Real Tooth Aries website website is still up and functioning, but it has not become the mega-lucrative brand it aspired to be.

Hilary Duff no longer seems to be attached to the movie, which has been stalled out for years, and it has not seared a copyrightable image of the Tooth Fairy into our minds.

The Tooth Fairy's freak flag is still flying.

And I'd like to think that's innate to the Tooth Fairy, somehow guaranteed that there's an inherent wildness to a creature so associated with teeth.

But I'm not so sure.

The real Tooth Fairy's founding observation seems sound to me, if icky.

The Tooth Fairy is low-hanging fruit.

If this particular attempt to monetize it was way too brazenly ka-ching-ka-ching, maybe something more subtle, more adorable, more innocent could work.

Something that wasn't trying to be like other girls' toys, but had its eye on Disney or the history of Santa Claus, a brand that understood that though you absolutely have to appeal to children, you have to appeal to adults too.

Be something grown-ups will accept and pass on.

Because we're the ones who are keeping these mythical beings alive in the first place.

When my children started losing their teeth, I hadn't thought about the Tooth Fairy for decades.

But there she was, just waiting for us.

A ritual that had been packed up and stowed away, but that could be taken down and put right to use.

Most parents do this, pass the tooth fairy on reflexively because it's sweet and magical, because we remember it fondly, because it's what you do, because it's a way to reassure ourselves our children are still little, even as they are demonstrably going through the physical process of getting older.

We pass it on even though it's not as central or sacred as Santa, and even though it is a lie.

My mom described it in hindsight as like the end of innocence.

Christina Katarucci again.

Apparently, my sister and I both asked my parents, like, why did you lie to us?

Why do parents lie to their kids?

Because it is painful in that moment.

And they're like, we didn't really have a good answer, just sort of like, well, we enjoyed it when we were kids, and it's just kind of what you do.

But the experience wasn't only negative.

I just remember the next day, you know, waltzing into second grade, feeling like an old grizzled vet, like

almost feeling like

super upset by the knowledge, but proud also that I felt like I had some knowledge that these other kids didn't have.

So Christina felt disappointed, but she also felt mature.

We tend not to focus on this part of the ritual, the end and all its complexities.

But I think it's as important as all of the adorable believing that comes before.

The Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, and Santa may be about magic and imagination and innocence, but they peter out for kids, usually between the ages of eight and 10, with a creeping awareness that something is not quite right, that grown-ups are keeping something from them, that they have to figure out what's really going on for themselves.

And if they've been lucky, that might be the first time that's happened to them.

But no matter how lucky they are,

it will not

be the last.

It's another strange thing about these mythical beings.

We think of them as a joyful rite for little kids, but they're also a milestone on the way to no longer being one.

In this way, the tooth aerie is for grown-ups.

It's for helping us make them.

I wonder if it's actually real.

Because sometimes it looks like a grown-up's handwriting and then the other times it looks like a fairy but it's weird so i'm in the middle if i think a tooth fairy is real or not

this is decodering i'm willa paskin you can find me on twitter at willa paskin and if you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode you can email us at decodering at slate.com This podcast was written by Willa Paskin, who produces Decodering with Katie Shepard.

This episode was edited by Jamie York.

Derek John is Slate's executive producer of narrative podcasts.

Merit Jacob is senior technical director.

Thank you to Charles Duan, Jim Pittick, Purva Merchant, Hannah Morris, Laura Leahy, Tori Bosch, and Rebecca Onion.

I'd also be remiss if I didn't mention Rosemary Wells.

Wells was an instructor at a dental school in Illinois who in the 1970s realized no one had ever seriously looked at the tooth fairy or where it originated.

And so she became that person.

She is the tooth fairy investigator and a lot of her work is out of print, but you can find one of her pieces in a collection called The Good People, New Fairy Lore Essays.

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