My parents had we kids remove our shoes as soon as we arrive home to prevent bringing dirt, dust, etc. into our home. As an adult I always remove my shoes as soon as I enter my home. My siblings' children and grandchildren do likewise.
Not any longer, but when I first got married, it was a must according to my wife’s rules of the household. Not only that, we lived in Hawaii when got married, and it’s much more customary there than it is in many parts of the US mainland.
The background is that my wife is Asian, and had newly arrived in the States to marry me, so a lot of her customs came with her. Prior to getting married, I had lived in various military barracks and/or aboard ship for four years straight, so being in a civilized household run by a woman was a bit foreign to me, it took some adjusting. Not all of her customs were entirely unfamiliar to me, though, because I spent that same four-year period in several countries throughout Asia and the Pacific. It’s just that being married to and dealing one-on-one every day with someone is a lot different than traveling through countries.
Now, after transfers all over the continental US while I was still in the Marines, and after more than three decades of marriage to each other, it wasn’t until I read your question that I realized she hasn’t been a stickler about it for years and years, and nowadays it’s only practiced sporadically at our house or even when we visit other houses.
The take-your-shoes-off-at-the-threshold has subtly different connotations across various countries, customs and cultures. Many people do it to avoid tracking dirt into the house from out in the streets or roads or pathways, which might be made of dirt themselves. In Thailand, however, among some people there, there are also spiritual/religious/superstitious reasons. Evil spirits cannot enter a clean and blessed and sacred home through windows, doors, any other openings, not even through walls, roofs, etc. The feet are considered to be the filthiest part of the body, and evil spirits, which come from hell below, ride on the soles of footwear in an attempt to enter a clean house so that they can spoil it and possess people inside of it. There is a physical barrier that must be stepped over either just outside or just inside every threshold where shoes are supposed to be left, trapping the spirits outside of the dwelling. The barrier might be a piece of wood or bamboo, but its presence above the ground, even an inch or two, is too high for lowly, vile evil spirits to climb over.
I learned all of this detailed info the hard way. Long before I was married, I was in Thailand and I was helping a “lady friend” of mine by carrying some heavy things she had bought at the market, taking them from the taxi to inside her mother’s house. I had been there before and had always removed my slippers at the threshold. That day, however, I made the mistake once of stepping over the protective barrier and allowing the filthy bottom of the sole of one slipper to touch the inside floor of the house. Her mother, who didn’t speak any English, went crazy! She flew straight to the Buddhist altar that is found in every home and business there (even massage parlors and brothels, or so I’m told), began chanting and praying and bowing repeatedly and lighting incense and running all over the house waving the incense and casting out my demons. Of course, I was cast out first, I should add, along with my offending slippers. My “lady friend”, a believer herself, even though less upset than her mother was, was not happy with me at all. Not because she understood Westerners better than her mother did, but because she had stressed to me a million times how important it was.
She got over it, though. Later that night, I turned on the charm of offering a little “Randy Candy”, and she . . . wait, this is a family show, right?
[Edited due to being rife with errors.]
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Thank you!
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Randy D 