Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. This week we focus on the Tooth Fairy, Monday he questioned why we value baby teeth to begin with.

The tooth fairy started life as a mouse that started life as a fairy. Or, in some tellings, a fairy who started life as a mouse. I know. Not the radiation-laced tale of shame and vengeance for which most of you were probably jonesing. And the fairies’ nemesis? An evil, tyrannical king. For our purposes, though, he’s an evil, tyrannical king with a plasma cannon for a hand. So, according to this French fairy tale (called “La Bonne Petite Souris,” meaning “The Good Little Mouse”), there was a happy queen who was all crepes and smiles until the evil king from a different castle started blowing up all the cafes and boulangeries with his triple-barrel plasma arm. Fortunately, the queen was friends with, depending on the version, a good little mouse or a just-above-average fairy who agrees to lend a helping paw, or tiny, unsettling fairy hand with creepy little painted fingernails. The mouse then proceeds to transform into a fairy (or vise a versa), plant itself under the king’s pillow and, come nightfall, knock out all of the king’s teeth, thereby, chasing away the shadows of war (You’d think that this would just make the king angrier, but for some reason it drives him crazy and topples his empire. Maybe the diamond power cells for the plasma arm were hidden in his molars.)

A fairy, some teeth, a pillow – that’s most of the ingredients right there. Cut out the king and equip the miniscule hero with tooth radar and a slush fund (also make it take off that insipid beret) and you’ve got yourself the tooth fairy.

Unfortunately, the specifics of this transatlantic process’ evolutionary particulars remain shrouded in mystery. Some saucy folklorists even argue that the French fairy tale and America’s hardest working flight-capable civil servant are entirely unrelated. After all, in the French story, the fairy goes on a perilous mission to liberate a dying nation; in the American story, the fairy just sort of dodders around with a change purse and a trash bag full of dental waste. Perhaps, then, she’s more closely related to British house fairies, like Brownies – naked, scruffy mensches who tidy a home at night, or even churn butter and thrash grain. Or like the elves from the classic Grimm’s fairy tale “The Elves and the Shoemaker,” about a group of industrious, mystical scamps who make with the grunt work for a destitute cobbler. As long as there’s a supernatural race willing to devote their powers to hand-cramping minutia in the name of the ever-entitled human race, why not assign one to the disposal of useless, cluttersome bones? (Not all house fairies were good. Despite their seeming enthusiasm for chores, some Brownies were known to un-tidy a house that was too neat, and Boggarts got up to all sorts of poltergeist-style domestic shenanigans.)

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Regardless of which story supplied more of the legend’s raw material, fairies were a cornerstone of Western European folklore. America, fetid cultural stew that it is, could have easily borrowed piecemeal from both the French and British traditions. What everyone does agree on is that isolated variants of today’s tooth fairy myth started popping up in the United States around 1900, and portrayed the fairy not as a unique, specific being wrought by the fates to wrangle children’s teeth, but rather as a standard-issue benevolent fairy who merely had a weird predilection for tooth collection.

Then, in 1949, author Lee Rogow published a children’s story called “The Tooth Fairy.” It was about a very specific, one-of-a-kind fairy, and it hit America at the perfect time. WWII had ended and the 1950s were about to begin. American cultural values shifted their attentions from world politics and a collectivist all-for-one jingoism to a fresh American insularity that placed new significance upon the so-called nuclear family unit, domestic (meaning both intranational and intrafamilial) politics and social values. Suddenly, active parenting became a national concern, and kid-centric stories like that of the tooth fairy – stories that few parents had the time for while they were stamping out rifle rounds in ad hoc munitions factories or firing those rounds into the ugly faces of fascist Kraut bastards – became stalwart American narratives. Exactly how American? Well, according to a number of occasionally conducted economic surveys and studies, the tooth fairy calculates for inflation.

Alternately, perhaps the true measure of an American folktale’s successful ubiquity is its conversion into a viable horror property. Santas slaughtering, Bigfeet mauling and Bogeymen terrorizing the older brother from 7th Heaven are all familiar genre fodder. Likewise, the tooth fairy has seen her fair share of violent, bloody action.

Friday: The Tooth Fairy as Villain

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