Giving shoes as a gift
A familiar superstition warns that if you give someone shoes, they may walk away from you. The worry hides a generous question about whether you are willing to help someone go further, even if it takes them away.
What it may mean
Shoes are what carry a person out the door. So a gift of shoes picked up a warning: the one who receives them may use them to walk away from the giver, out of the friendship or the marriage. Some families still hand back a coin, just in case. The fear points at something real. Good help often does make people more independent. A parent buying a child's first school shoes, a partner buying running shoes for a marathon, a friend giving boots for a long trip are all equipping someone to go farther, sometimes far from the giver. A gift of shoes asks whether you can love someone enough to help them leave, a little or a lot. Customs around shoes run deep at weddings, births and moves, and families read the gift in many ways.
Depending on how you saw it
Shoes for a partner
A partner who receives a fine pair of shoes is more likely to wear them on a dinner date than to leave in them. Still, some couples swap a coin to settle the old worry. Which fear about your relationship do you settle with a joke instead of a talk?
A baby's first shoes
First shoes are a classic gift for a toddler learning to walk, and many families keep them for years. Every step in them is a step a little further from the parents' arms. Which early independence of someone you love are you proud of and a little sad about?
Running or hiking shoes for a goal
Buying shoes for someone's race or trek is a vote of confidence in a plan that does not include you. Their miles will be their own. Whose solo plan could you support with something practical this month?
Donating shoes you no longer wear
An old saying warned against giving away your own shoes, as if your future went with them. Most of us simply donate a pair that no longer fits. What have you outgrown that someone else could put to good use?
Why it happens in nature
Shoes must fit a particular foot closely, so they are a tricky gift and are often exchanged. They also carry strong symbolism in wedding, birth and travel customs in many countries, which helps explain why superstitions gather around giving them. Swapping a coin makes the present a pretend sale, the same remedy used for knives.
What folk beliefs say
Spain
Among the middle classes in Spain, a young man would ask his betrothed for the measure of her foot shortly before the wedding and make her a pair of white satin shoes himself, presented on the wedding day so that she might always walk on satin.
Source: Cora Linn Daniels; C. M. Stevans (eds.), Encyclopaedia of Superstitions, Folklore, and the Occult Sciences of the World, vol. 1 (1903), vol. 1, p. 128. View the page
To reflect on
Whose path could you help along, even if it leads them away from you?