MILL CREEK — The tooth fairy is mostly a mystery to first-graders at Silver Firs Elementary School, but there are a few things they know for sure.
"The tooth fairy is nice," 7-year-old Lauryn Newman said.
"Tooth fairies can give you money," said Courtney Newlon, 7.
"She has to be pretty small to squeeze under the pillows," said Jacob Guzman, also 7.
But the kids had more questions than answers in letters and drawings they recently made of the mythical figure. The project was part of National Children’s Dental Health Month in February.
Their questions for the tooth fairy included:
Where do you get all the money? I wonder how old you are? How do you fly? And can I have $5?
"The only thing that’s hard is when their visions of the tooth fairy are different," said Judy Johnson, one of two teachers coordinating the letter-writing campaign.
"One girl said her teeth come back as a pearl in a bracelet. Now the other girls in class are waiting for their bracelets."
The origins of the tooth fairy as we know it are a little sketchy.
Unlike Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny (who, by the way, spend all but one day each year on vacation, while the tooth fairy never gets a day off), the tooth fairy has had few stories written in her honor.
Rituals involving baby teeth have been around for centuries.
Some say the Vikings had a "tooth fee," where a small gift was given to a child when its first tooth appeared. Another more chilling English tradition had children dropping their lost tooth into a fire to avoid having to look for it after death.
Dr. Leland Shenfield, a pediatric dentist in Mill Creek, has an idea about why lost-tooth rituals seem to span cultures and generations.
"When a child loses something that’s a part of themselves, it’s nice to think of it as a magical moment, a changing over," he said. "It’s a movement from infancy to more of an early childhood. A lot of kids are very proud of it, as kind of a rite of passage."
Selby Beeler, a children’s book author who lives in Rochester, Minn., wrote "Throw Your Tooth on the Roof," which looks at different world cultures and what they do with those fallen choppers.
Beeler said it’s rare in other countries to hear much talk of any of these traditions. She said she spoke with people who grew up near one another in the same country but never knew the other’s tooth-loss rituals.
"But we make a big deal of everything — it’s our way," she said. "It was great fun to do the research, just because all you could do was ask people."
In Chile or Costa Rica, parents will have the tooth made into a charm. In Venezuela, kids put the tooth under a pillow and a mouse brings money, as in France and many other places.
In parts of Africa, kids throw the tooth at the sun and shout, "Take this donkey tooth and bring me a gazelle tooth," Beeler said.
"It’s a custom that’s been much played with," the author said. "I just wonder if it’s not the parents’ way of figuring out how to make it special."
But Sydney Seiber, one of the Silver Firs first-graders, doesn’t think parents are involved at all.
"I don’t think parents would leave the money for you under your pillow," she said. "I think the tooth fairy comes."
Sydney, 7, lost a tooth on Monday but had nothing to offer the tooth fairy except a hand-written note explaining that she swallowed the tooth along with a fruit roll-up at lunchtime.
But the note was good enough, and there was a dollar waiting under her pillow in the morning.
Reporter Victor Balta: 425-339-3455 or vbalta@heraldnet.com.
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