Shoes on the table
Shoes on the table were frowned on in old Bohemian belief, which warned that your feet would ache. The rule also keeps the street away from the place where food is served, and it can be applied to more than shoes.
What it may mean
Few household rules are as widely felt and as rarely explained as this one: shoes do not go on the table. Set a new pair beside the fruit bowl and someone will gasp, even if they cannot say why. Whatever its roots, the rule keeps the street apart from the place where a household feeds itself. Soles carry whatever the sidewalk held; the table is where food is shared. That line is worth drawing in other places too. What do you bring to your own table, real or figurative, that belongs somewhere else? Phones at dinner, work arguments at breakfast, the grime of a hard day dragged into a conversation that should be restful. A clean surface for the things that nourish you is worth keeping.
Depending on how you saw it
A new pair still in the box
A shoebox on the table is perfectly clean, yet some people still move it at once. The habit is older than the box. Which of your reactions run on a habit so old that the reason no longer applies?
Muddy work boots on the kitchen table
Boots end up on the table in a hurry, to be tied or wiped, and the mess spreads to where food goes. A mat and a bench by the door solve most of it. Where would a landing spot keep one part of your day from spilling into another?
A child's shoes on the table
Small shoes often land on the table because that is where an adult can put them on a child at a comfortable height. Practical needs bend old rules all the time. Which rule in your house would you bend for a good reason, and which would you keep?
Why it happens in nature
Shoe soles pick up dirt, grit and germs from sidewalks, floors and public restrooms, and they leave some of it wherever they are set down, so keeping shoes away from food surfaces is ordinary hygiene. A table is also the largest flat surface in many homes, which is why things land on it in a hurry.
What folk beliefs say
Bohemia (Czech lands)
In Bohemia it was said that you should never put your shoes and stockings on the table, or your feet would ache.
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. 494. View the page
To reflect on
Which piece of your day keeps landing on the table where you eat?