SUNDAY RERUN: Santa Pinch-Hits for the Tooth Fairy

Here I am, with Mama and two of my brothers, Gary, and Walter (Skip).

Time again for a Sunday Favorite! Click on the button in my left sidebar to join the party over at Chari's!

This is from my "other" blog, a personal diary, and was first posted in June of 2002.

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Okay, so it isn’t exactly a seasonal entry. This coming weekend is the get-together of all the women on my mom’s side of the family, and we’re all supposed to arrive with stories and anecdotes about our relatives, living or dead. Doing it here let’s me get it into my own journal, too, some 45 years late.

I was a woman of “a certain age”. You know the one I mean—old enough to lose her teeth, and young enough to be excited about it. Also too chicken to speed the process up in any way, which is why one of my front teeth hung by a mere thread for what was, apparently, too long for Grandma P to handle.

I was standing upstairs in my Aunt Charlotte’s old bedroom, talking to Grandma, when all of a sudden she stuck her hand in my mouth, grabbed the loose tooth, and yanked. I yelped.

“Well, it was just hangin’ there!” said Grandma.

I got over the shock pretty quick. After all, a gone tooth meant money from the Tooth Fairy. I went downstairs to the bathroom to rinse my mouth, setting the tooth on the edge of the sink. Guess I splashed too much, because an instant later it was gone. Down the drain. Lost. I was crushed.

I don’t remember anything else until the next morning, which just happened to be Christmas. Under the Christmas tree was a little cradle that I knew instantly Grandpa had made for me, and in the cradle was a doll, and on the doll’s cheek was a dime. That puzzled me, and I asked Grandpa about it.

“Well,” he said, “you know that tooth you lost last night?”

“Yes.”

“Well, it went down the drain, and through the pipe, right down to the crick out yonder,” and he gestured toward the woods beyond the pasture (strawberry patch back then) to where the creek was. “This little fish saw it come out, and he told a little bird, and the bird flew to the North Pole and told Santa Claus. And Santa got on the phone and called the Tooth Fairy, and she said, “Santa, since you’re going to be out there anyway, could you drop off a dime for me?”

And yes. Of course I believed him. It was Grandpa.