NEW YORK POST:
When Elisabeth Asbrink invites you to visit her in Stockholm, Sweden, be sure to wear your very best socks.
“I hate it when people walk into my home in their shoes. In that way I am extremely Swedish,” she said. “We find it very, very rude.”
Removing your shoes before entering a home is a universal norm in Sweden, Asbrink says — but not a lesson her immigrant parents, born in Budapest and London, ever taught her.
“When they went to the homes of colleagues and friends they would dress up, then had to have dinner in their socks. Which they found very strange,” Asbrink recalled. “They believed that it was an old tradition, from when Sweden was a peasant country full of earth and mud.”
They were wrong, as Asbrink, an acclaimed journalist, learned years later.
In “Made in Sweden” (Scribe), out Tuesday, Asbrink explains the awkward truth: Sweden’s no-shoes rule is not a quaint custom carried to the city from Sweden’s farms but the lingering effect of an edict handed down by its all-encompassing welfare state.
