Hogfather, The Tooth Fairy and Sympathetic Magic

 Hogfather, The Tooth Fairy and Sympathetic Magic (Golden Bough)

Is There a Witch Bottle in Your House? - JSTOR Daily

Use of body parts etc for magic

https://daily.jstor.org/is-there-a-witch-bottle-in-your-house/

https://www.quora.com/Why-do-witches-use-hair-blood-and-pictures-to-place-spells-on-people 

The exposé of the hypocrisy of capitalist Christmas whilst at the same time believing in Christmas spirit ie Hallmark and Disney is classic English, obviously very Dickens Victoriana. Guilting using sentimental stories like the Little Match girl was still current in my Childhood. In fact there's still this thing about competing major stores Christmas adverts on the telly apparently. Not that I'm really much in touch with that. 

I thought TP 's whole debate about poverty and hypocrisy was pretty well put, seeming to go along with the materialism the skewering it in the third section. 

I enjoyed the search for the origin of the tooth fairy. I followed it up and agree its pretty recent with something much more noir in it's past. 

I conclude I think TP got the stuff about teeth, toe nail clipping etc from the book The Golden Bough in the link below. Quickly debunked as anthropology but as it picked up on a few ideas from the past much embroidered on and seems interesting the public took it up and ran with it. Even now when I looked up spells, curses and suchlike on Quora and Reddit people who say they are practicing witches quote it more or less word for word in describing how they operate. 

Chapter 3. Sympathetic Magic. § 3. Contagious Magic. Frazer, Sir James George. 1922. The Golden Bough

https://www.bartleby.com/196/7.html

I think in England the Tooth Fairy idea caught on as there was already a notion of hiding milk teeth incase they could be used by witches. But I can't find a really reliable source. I think I'd have to go deeper on the witchcraft rabbit hole which I don't feel like at the mo. Anyways I'm pretty certain TP will have got it from the Golden Bough, probably read the original being him.

Don't tell the kids: The real history of the tooth fairy | Salon.com

“Of course, rituals surrounding tooth loss date back much further than that. Every recorded human culture has some kind of tradition surrounding the disposal of a child’s lost baby teeth, and in the 1960s, a researcher named B. R. Townend distilled these rituals down to nine basic forms (as summarized by Wells in her 1991 essay “The Making of an Icon”):

(1) the tooth was thrown into the sun; (2) thrown into the fire; (3) thrown between the legs; (4) thrown onto or over the roof of the house, often with an invocation to some animal or individual; (5) placed in a mouse hole near the stove or hearth or offered to some other animal; (6) buried; (7) hidden where animals could not get it; (8) placed in a tree or on a wall; and (9) swallowed by the mother, child or animal.

The items weren’t mutually exclusive, either. Perhaps the most widely practiced ritual, one that has been documented everywhere from Russia to New Zealand to Mexico, involves offering the lost tooth as a sacrifice to a mouse or rat, in the hopes that the child’s adult teeth will grow in as strong and sturdy as the rodent’s — a wish for transference that anthropologists call “sympathetic magic.” This offering is often accompanied by a specific prayer or song, and, in a pinch, any strong-toothed animal will do. Leo Kanner’s “Folklore of the Teeth,” from 1928, records similar ceremonies involving cats, dogs, squirrels and beavers.

While there are many rites of passage in a person’s life, the loss of a baby tooth is arguably the first — and, thus, the most frightening. The three stages in a rite of passage, as described in Arnold van Gennep’s book of the same name, are nicely mirrored in both the loss of a tooth and the tooth-fairy ritual in general: separation (tooth falls out; child leaves tooth under pillow), transition (gap in teeth; child goes to sleep) and incorporation (new tooth grows in; child wakes up to a gift of money). In “Flights of Fancy, Leaps of Faith,” Cindy Dell Clark has further argued that the use of monetary rewards — and leaving money for each tooth, not just the first one, is another distinctly American invention — helps children transition into the world of adulthood, where cash is a symbol of increased agency and responsibility. ”

https://www.salon.com/2014/02/09/dont_tell_the_kids_the_real_history_of_the_tooth_fairy/