China wife said that in China (or at least in the Ningbo/Shanghai culture) bottom baby teeth, since they point up, get thrown up onto the roof. Upper baby teeth, get tossed into the garden.
Chinese kids have no tooth fairy. Finding a quarter under my pillow as a kid was just magic. I’m going to introduce the toothfairy tonight.
Our daughter MilliCal has not only been trading teeth and Sacajawea dollars with the Tooth Fairy, she’s been carrying on a lively correspondence with her for years.
Coincidentally, Pepper Mill is getting better at writing with her left hand.
That’s the same as in Japan, so do what we did! The first night the tooth gets put under the pillow, with a note to the tooth fairy asking her to leave the tooth. The kid gets the money and the tooth is thrown the next morning.
…
Unless you are HB kid who in the end couldn’t part with any of his teeth, and who hoards them in a little box. No throwing for him, oh, nonononono.
Oh, and if your kids are anything like mine, this can be a useful point. At some point your kid WILL be called a foreigner or be teased that she is different. In the list of “Well, they’re just jealous because THEY don’t get to go on holiday most years abroad, THEY can’t speak English, etc, you can add, and THEY don’t get the tooth fairy either”
Just one more thing our lucky kids get double the fun out of.
Later on, do wisdom teeth get hurled into the library?
I love your idea. There is an absolute imperative to mix and match cultures wherever possible. Perhaps in China, there are upper and lower tooth fairies to share the enormous number of teeth. Perhaps there’s an acquisitive dragon, possessed of a million teeth but still anxious for more, who is willing to trade coins from his great hoard for the best teeth in his realm(because the fiercest dragon, the one with the most and brightest teeth, becomes the Dragon King for a year). If China bambina wants to help her dragon become king, she’ll have to keep her teeth extra clean and sharpen them on fruit and raw vegetables…
Gee, I have no idea where all that came from. Thinking about my own kids, I guess. Sorry – ignore it, please. And congratulations to China bambina on this milestone of a day.
That’s what we do in Korea, too. So the magpies can use them in their nests. Or something. It’s interesting that they do this in other Asian cultures as well. As a child, however, I had a preference for the Tooth Fairy, for obvious reasons.
My youngest brother found this whole notion of “my teeth fell off but it’s not broken and I’m getting a new one” fascinating. Since Middlebro is two years older than Lilbro, Lilbro had seen it happen to Middlebro, but still, he was both intrigued by the teeth themselves (they’re all different!) and worried, “what if mine don’t grow? Will I have to get put-out teeth like gramma?”
So he kept his first milk teeth in a jar until he could feel the next ones and then asked me to write a note to the tooth fairy for him saying he was sorry for the delay.