When you were a child, what was your idea of what The Easter Bunny / Hare and the Tooth Fairy looked like?

All was chocolate! Cadbury cream eggs and hollow milk chocolate. Nothing else mattered. The tooth fairy was quarters. I sold to my dad for $5 , and cut out the middle man.

The tooth fairy was pretty, but I didn’t have a specific face for her.

The bunny was just completely fake to me. Either chocolate or a cartoon. I didn’t know the eater bunny brought gifts like Santa Claus until 5 years ago in my mid 40’s!

The Tooth Fairy dressed in gossamer blue and flew about with her silvery, sparkly, LED powered wand, whacking people to make them shimmer too.

We never had such luxury to imagine these things, we grew up poor and had to survive without knowledge of things like this. Fairy tales etc were never in our vocabulary.

Well, Fairy Tales were actually invented by the impoverished. “Cinderella” is a good example. It had nothing to do with lack of money.
I suspect there was too much anger and rage and fear in your up bringing for you kids to to take flights of fancy.

My parents knew better than to try to sell me on the hows of the Easter Bunny. The warning was severe. “Nobody knows how the bunny brings those baskets. But if he finds out you’re asking questions, he will take it all back.”

Well that sucks @stanleybmanly!

Oh, I have the best Easter Bunny story ever, thanks to my kids who, for some reason, were a tad analytical growing up.

It was their defense against “but how does he carry the baskets?” Or “who let him in?” My folks knew from the Santa interrogations that answering the questions was only going to encourage nonstop pestering from us over how and why the bunny delivered. My dad would simply grin and say “ask your mother”, and she would bat him if he was within striking distance. But they would tire eventually of our pestering, and my father would get that “you’re close to the wire” look on his face as he advised us that it might be a bad idea to delve too deeply into the bunny’s business.

I think I imagined a tinker bell type fairy as per my teeth and quarters under my pillow.
The others not so much.

Q. What’s the advantage to Alzheimer’s?

A. You can hide your own Easter eggs.

I guess my parents never went through contortions, much less marital disagreements, to come up with ridiculous, magical answers to what ever questions I had. I guess I always just knew.
Same with religion. “How could they possibly get every animal on the Ark?”
“Well, Valre. Just think about it.”

With Ant Man technology, it would have been possible for Noah.

I don’t know what Ant Man technology is.

. My parents didn’t celebrate the Easter Bunny. We celebrated Easter. The one with Jesus Christ. So I don’t think we ever really thought about it. We got candy on Easter though, because for Lent, we usually gave up sweets.

Easter krolik was misshapen creature that escape from secret KGB laboratory.
It roam wilderness at night, making screech of pain as he force eggs out of anus.
Such is life in Soviet Russia.

There was no Easter Bunny in my childhood. There was an Easter Rabbit. (“Bunny” was babytalk, like “doggie” and “kitty.”) The Easter Rabbit was rather a latecomer to our family tradition, which consisted mainly of going to church in new spring clothes, even in the snow, and singing Christ the Lord Is Risen Today, Alleluia. (A grander version here. ) By the time my mother introduced colored eggs and chocolate candies in a basket, I was old enough to know it was a game, whereas the serious part, the church part, was there every Sunday forever.

(How could you not catch on, anyway, when the eggs you dyed on Saturday were “brought” by a mythical creature on Sunday morning? You’d have to work hard to fall for that. Thus it ever was, for me, with matters of indoctrinated faith.)

Nevertheless, I did picture one, and he looked like a first cousin to the White Rabbit as illustrated by John Tenniel (not Walt Disney), but in a pastel-colored waistcoat and jaunty hat. Mythical beings never required belief; they just required imagination.

As for the Tooth Fairy, I don’t think I believed in that one either, but to the extent that I played along, I imagined something like these. Cicely Mary Barker owned the fairy standard when I was a child, and still does, in the part of my mind that remembers fairies.

Well only babies believe in the Easter Bunny Jeruba!

I mean, as a boy I hoped the Easter Bunny worked for Playboy…genuinely.
The Tooth Fairy, on the other hand, I viewed as a somewhat sinister figure lurking in the shadows bent on seperating my teeth from my mouth, while offering appeasement through a monetary gift, most likely accrued from the narcotics trade.

@Jeruba I really like what you said: ” Mythical beings never required belief; they just required imagination.”