ANYONE who grew up in an Asian household went through it—having to take a break from scampering in and out of the house with childhood friends in order to doff your footwear, with your non-Asian pals giving you the quizzical looks of the uninitiated. After the shoe-bomber incident, TSA regulations forced all Americans to choose nicer socks when they travelled by air—but didn’t seem all that big a burden to those better trained by angry, anal-retentive Asian mothers than by airport rent-a-cops.

Now, with the holiday party season in full swing and all of us enjoying the fruits of racial and cultural mingling, a question of etiquette comes up every time you enter someone else’s household: shoes on or off?

There are cases to be made for either position. First, and most obviously, shoes-off homes have less dirt tracked in from outside.

“You should see how fast someone cleans up a spill when they are not wearing shoes,” Manhattan attorney Hieu Pham wrote in an e-mail.

“Shoes off = cleaner floors = less housework,” New Yorker Zoe Chan wrote even more succinctly.

Leaving their shoes at the door also makes most people feel physically more comfortable, and makes everything seem a lot less formal. With shoes off, you’ll find people sitting cross-legged on the floor, lounging around like family members and making themselves at home.

But a shoes-on policy has its points too. First of all, there’s not that awkward, one-legged de-shoeing process in someone’s foyer while a queue forms up behind you. There’s no question of someone stealing your shoes or the dog or mischievous children leaving surprises in them for you when you leave. And you’re not going to have to undergo the misery of stepping in someone else’s spill with bare feet.

“As for parties, the place is going to get trashed and the floor dirty, so I think that shoes are a must both for fashion and for avoiding stepping into a pile of food, wine, etc.,” said Nancy Park, living in Chicago.

Park hinted at another reason to keep footwear firmly in place. For women, shoes often make the outfit, and a carefully chosen ensemble could be ruined. Maybe a shoes-off rule is a little TOO informal.

“[In Sweden], people have ‘house clogs’ the way Asians have their slippers,” wrote Paisley Davidson, who lives in Brooklyn. “This was done everywhere, in young people’s homes and old, and nobody makes allowances at parties for good-looking outfits, which always messed me up and drove me crazy! I think it’s one reason that the women there pretty much just wear ugly shoes all the time.”

And finally, how do you gloss over the embarrassing discovery that your Napoleonic boss wears elevator shoes?

“[An American] friend has this shoe policy at his place in London and had a party,” Hieu wrote. “Anyway, this relatively short girl had to take off her heels, making her even shorter. She walked around on her toes all night.”

An informal survey by TMM revealed that the respondents were overwhelmingly shoes-off. Granted, most of those queried live in New York City, where, well, have you ever ridden the F train on a Saturday night? But the reasons for banning footwear from a home’s inner sanctum fell into a couple distinct categories.

The Baby:

Brooklynite Diane Mehta grew up in a shoes-on household but enforced an anti-shoe rule because of her son, Ivan.

“My son would come in from playing outside, and his feet would always be dirty from the playground, so we always told him to take his shoes off,” she said. “We’d have to take off our shoes also, because he was always crawling around and he’d be face-down on the floor. Now, if we don’t take our shoes off, he insists and makes us take them off the second we’re inside.”

Being a bit of a germaphobe, Alice Lee Stevens, who lives in Long Beach, Calif., always preferred shoes to be off inside the house, but now that she has a little girl, it’s a steadfast rule in certain parts of the home.

“You just don’t know what’s on the bottom of people’s shoes,” she wrote. “I don’t want her playing on the floor or eating off the floor after someone has walked on it with dirty shoes. In the baby room, no one is allowed in with shoes. I wish I could make everyone take their shoes off all the time.”

Vanessa Pineda Fox made her household more strongly shoes-off after their baby was born.

“For me, seeing the crumbles of mud and dirt that comes off our shoes, and then to think of it all over the apartment with the baby putting things in her mouth first, and asking questions later, is enough for me to become a little proactive about asking people to de-shoe before entering,” she said. “If our place were bigger, I’d love a bench and shoe-holder-type area, so people could see how we’d like them to walk around the joint.”

The Comfort:

“It’s more comfy, and you can put your feet up on the sofa without any recriminations from the lady of the house,” said Brooklynite Hanh Bui. (Sorry, Hanh.)

“People enjoy being shoeless on the shag,” Hieu wrote. “No shoes creates a more cozy environment.”

A Beastie Boy Told Them To:

“I went to a party at Adam Yauch’s in Soho, and they had no-shoe rule,” Brooklynite David Koeppel said. “His wife is Asian and they’re both Buddhists. Just a name-dropping tidbit.”

A couple other interesting facts popped up as well. First of all, a surprising number of people keep slippers by the door for guests. Manhattanite Allison Mattera Charles, for one, even has a special pair set aside for her father. Christine Yeh, of Queens, brings her own pair of slippers to wear at work and even considers it a good idea to bring her own pair to other people’s parties.

Most surprising? Non-Asians were more uniformly anti-shoe than the Asians who responded.

“Based on my upbringing in Minnesota I had assumed that (at least in northern climates) one always removes one’s shoes when entering a house during winter,” wrote Brooklynite Matt Laumb. “It would be disrespectful not to. You’ve got slush, mud, salt and sand in your treads no matter how much you try to wipe off on the doormat.”

So there you go. If someone raises a stink next time you ask them to strip off the sneakers at your next shindig, just tell them it’s part of the experience of immersing themselves in the ways of another culture—Minnesota. •