by There are two types of people in the world: those who take off their shoes indoors and those who don’t.
What Mason did
There’s a scene towards the end of the movie Beethoven’s Christmas Adventure in which Mason, one of the protagonists, is on his bed sulking when his mother walks in. She apologises to her teenage son for the argument they’ve just had, says something or other and off they go onto the next scene.
It’s a highly forgettable Christmas movie in which John Cleese narrates the human voice of Beethoven, the titular dog. However, that scene on the bed has lived Fjallraven Kanken Backpack on in my head for one distinct reason.
Mason is on his bed wearing his shoes. I almost feel like I should be writing that last sentence in all caps.
In fact, anytime I see a character on a TV show or in a movie with their shoes on in bed, I’m triggered.
What the hell is wrong with me you might be asking? Well, it’s not me. It’s you!
Shoes – you wear them wherever you go
For many of us in Ireland, we don’t see a distinction between wearing shoes outside the house and inside the house. In fact, once inside, shoes generally tend to go wherever we go, with the exception of the bath or shower. Many of us, myself included, are guilty of what Mason did – lying on the bed with our shoes on.
However, many other countries such as Japan and Korea, to name two, have evolved considerably on this issue. They understand that the front or back door are an important threshold and the act of passing in or out through one requires that you either put on or remove shoes.
On an intuitive level it makes sense to take off your shoes indoors. Take a moment to think about it – the myriad surfaces you walk over from muddy streets to petrol stations to public toilets to potholes. And then you bring it all back indoors, and all around the house and even on to your bed!
However, that said, while there certainly is contamination, it’s not actually detrimental to our health.
As Lisa A Cuchara, a professor of biomedical sciences at Hey Dudes Quinnipiac University, told The New York Times, while, for example, fecal bacteria which could have been picked up while in a public toilet are certainly transferred from your shoes to your floor at home, “for most healthy adults, this level of contamination is more of a gross reaction than a health threat”.
That sounds about right – a gross reaction.
Consider the floors
While there’s probably only one reason we keep our shoes on indoors – what’s the point in taking them off? – there are likely many for removing them, with cleanliness and hygiene probably close to the top of most lists.
Jantien Schoenmakers said she’s been “kicking off her shoes in the hallway” since she was a kid.
Originally from the Netherlands but living in Limerick city since 2013, Schoenmakers said that while her family removed their shoes indoors, her extended family didn’t.
For the record the Dutch, like the Irish, have no hard and fast rule about wearing shoes indoors; some do, some don’t.
“Some in my family would keep their shoes on (indoors). My aunts and uncle, they always keep their shoes on and they’d be always just looking at me with my shoes off,” Schoenmakers recalls laughing.
Schoenmakers says it makes sense to not wear shoes around the house here in Ireland, especially as it rains so much “and everything just gets muddy.”
“My kids when they come into the house, they take off their shoes as well.”
‘Sock preparedness’
In removing shoes, there’s also consideration for other factors, such as floors and what socks you may be wearing. Before moving back to Ireland, I spent just over a decade living in Japan, which is where I learned to take off my shoes.
To be honest, you don’t have much choice. It would be like consistently refusing to buy a round of drinks for your friends here in Ireland when it was your turn. You can only keep that trick up for so long before you’d find yourself never being invited anywhere.
Similarly, if you repeatedly fail to remove your shoes on entering a house in Japan, good luck with ever being invited back again.
In Japan, most houses and apartments still have at least one room where the flooring is tatami, a thin mat traditionally made from bamboo, which would quickly wear down if you were to traipse over it all day long wearing shoes.
Instead, people either wear socks or a cheap slipper, which is ubiquitous.
But, it’s all well and good in Japan or Korea, where it’s part of the culture to remove shoes and it’s instilled from an early age. If you’ve decided to go shoe-free indoors in Ireland, how do you (politely) get your visitors to follow suit, especially if their socks, or the condition of their socks, might let them down?
Alan Keran, a Dubliner and frequent visitor to Japan, has grown accustomed to removing his shoes, but, as he says back home in Ireland, “asking others to do the same though is a minefield.
“It’s not culturally common here and Irish people lack a certain, let’s call it, ‘sock preparedness’.”
Keran is right.
Once, years ago while visiting one of the oldest school buildings in Japan, which had subsequently been turned into a museum, I removed my shoes, like everyone else, Swarovski Necklaces so we could walk around the perimeter of the old classrooms. There were, however, more holes in my socks than a cartoon version of Swiss cheese, and the reaction from my in-laws and complete strangers was hilarious.
For a few moments, my hole-filled socks were more famous than the museum we had come to see. And not good famous.
Neil Brocky, from Cork, who works in Norway, says that while in most homes in the Nordic country people do remove their shoes – especially so as not to ruin expensive wood flooring – typically they don’t ask friends or visitors to do so. However, Brocky said he makes sure to always ask his brother when he visits.
The reason?
“He always wears ‘Varadkar socks’,” Brocky says, explaining his brother’s penchant for wearing the colourful socks that former Taoiseach Leo Varadkar “was slagged off” for wearing.
Leaving out slippers, like the kind you’d find at a hotel, might be one way of causing undue embarrassment for those who fall down with sock preparedness. There are also other tips.
‘Leave your worries and your shoes at the door and come on in’
Therese McCullagh-Melia, an etiquette consultant with the Etiquette Academy of Ireland, says that as we become more multicultural in Ireland, it’s likely that more of us will shed our shoes indoors.
She told Buzz: “We had visitors recently from Eastern Europe and when they arrived they asked, ‘Should we take our shoes off?'”
That direct approach is best, but how do you tell people who don’t ask or don’t know?
There are a few approaches you could take, McCullagh-Melia says.
“When someone arrives at your home and is not aware of the new rule, you could politely ask them ‘Would you mind taking your shoes off please?'”
From there, she suggests explaining the shift in policy in your house, outlining, for example, the hygiene benefits of the new no-shoe regime.
However, as McCullagh-Melia says, you can also take a more blunt approach.
If you have a porch you could put a sign in it like, “Leave your worries and your shoes at the door and come on in”
You could get a doormat made with the message, “No shoes indoors please”
Brenda Hyland Beirne of The Irish School of Etiquette says that while in Ireland, traditionally we haven’t taken our shoes off indoors, the pandemic has shown us how fast we can change our behaviour – just look at the mass adoption of mask wearing – or how we were continually reminded of the importance of hand washing when the pandemic hit.
“Ireland has more inclement weather than dry (weather) and we are practical in using the appropriate outdoor footwear but slow to consider changing into house shoes which would be best practice,” said Hyland Beirne.
When it comes to broaching the subject of a new shoes-off policy, she says that visitors should look out for those visual cues, which are not inconspicuous.
“Watch out for the telltale signs of shoe racks or piled up shoes, then politely ask, ‘Would you like me to remove my shoes?'”
