Woman Debates Attending Thanksgiving with Family Due to Sickness

Thanksgiving is meant to be a time for family, but for some, it comes with unexpected stress.

For one couple preparing for the holiday, a history of relatives being “careless about illnesses” created a dilemma that felt increasingly hard to navigate.

A Reddit poster explained that her husband’s extended family has a pattern of minimizing sickness, even when symptoms are recent or serious.

The woman recalled a past Thanksgiving when they “threw a party at their house when my [father-in-law] was sick a week prior.”

Their extended family still encouraged the couple to attend, despite her husband also having pneumonia, telling him to “just stay away from the kids” since “the house is already full of germs due to FIL.”

On top of that, the little cousins under age 5 had also “just recovered from [respiratory syncytial virus] a week prior” and still attended, adding to the poster’s long-standing unease.

So, this year, her concern is deeper than usual. She and her husband are scheduled to travel shortly after Thanksgiving to see her own family, including her baby niece, who is only a few months old.

Because she has only met the infant once – and her husband not at all – she worries about unintentionally carrying illness if her in-laws once again take a lax approach.

She explained that she would “be heartbroken if I have to tell my sister not to come while we are in town because someone was knowingly recently sick and still came to a family gathering carelessly.”

“I understand that theres also times getting sick isn’t avoidable but due to them being careless in the past it makes me worry,” she added. “Am I being over dramatic?”

The entire situation has the Reddit user wondering if asking her husband’s family about recent illnesses before attending would be overstepping.

While some commenters sympathized with her concerns, they advised her to skip the gathering altogether if she was so worried about her upcoming travels.

“Even if no one has symptoms at that very moment, they could still have a virus and pass it around,” one user warned.

Others, however, suggested she might be overthinking the situation, questioning whether the original poster was just looking for an excuse to avoid a family event and labeling her “dramatic.”

“It’s winter. Illness goes around. Kids are germ factories. If everyone was this paranoid no one would ever see family over the holidays,” one user emphasized.