Curbed?s advice columnist answers your trickiest questions about holiday hosting

Welcome to House Rules, Curbed?s new advice column; first up, our columnist answers your hosting and holiday questions. Other house-related dilemmas" Send them to [email protected].

With the holidays coming up, we expect extra friends and family tromping through our house. What?s the best way to ask house guests (preferably without having to actually ask) to remove their shoes when they come into our home without coming across as pushy or offensive"
?Clean in San Francisco
Dear Clean,
There?s nothing pushy or offensive about having house rules! Keeping wet and muddy shoes out of the house certainly makes a lot of sense, and for millions of people in the U.S. and around the world, the idea of wearing street shoes inside is almost unthinkable. (Social media lit up with joyful recognition earlier this year when the kids in the Ali Wong/Randall Park romcom Always Be My Maybe took off their shoes at the front door just to run through the house to the backyard, where they put them back on again.) But even though it?s fine to ask your guests to leave their shoes at the door, it can still be hard to feel like you?re welcoming them when you?re bossing them around like a TSA agent. The best way to get people to remove their shoes without being asked is to make it obvious that you remove your shoes, and to make it extra easy for them to do so too. At my old apartment I kept a shoe rac...