Mom of 4 Bans Family Members from Thanksgiving After They Contract Hand-Foot-and-Mouth Disease Ahead of Holiday

A woman turned to Reddit for advice after a tense family standoff over Thanksgiving plans and illness.

In her post, she explained that her young nephew was diagnosed with hand, foot and mouth disease — an illness that causes “sores in the mouth and a rash on the hands and feet,” according to the Mayo Clinic. The toddler became sick about two weeks earlier, and not long after, both her sister and brother-in-law also caught it.

“I told my mom that I did not want them in my house because they’re still contagious at this point,” she wrote, adding that one of her four children “gets sick easily.” The last time the illness came through their home, she said, “my 3 older kids were out of school for weeks.”

Despite her concerns, she said her mother called to say that the infected family would still be attending Thanksgiving at her house. “My mom then said that they will be gloved up and sitting at a table separate from everyone else,” she recalled.

However, she pointed out that her nephew would still have “free roam” of the house and that “he’s under two and therefore gets into stuff and still puts things in his mouth.”

She pushed back, asking why the holiday couldn’t simply be held elsewhere. “I told them if they were so set on coming to my house for Thanksgiving why couldn’t they have it at their house,” she wrote.

According to her, her mother responded that hosting at their own home would mean sanitizing afterward — something they didn’t want to deal with.

That reasoning left the poster feeling ignored and upset. “I said it was unfair that they weren’t willing to sanitize their house… but they wanted to come to my house and infect my household,” she shared.

The conversation ended when her mother became emotional. “She started to cry, said she wouldn’t have this conversation with me and hung up.”

The dynamic was even more complicated because her parents were providing the entire Thanksgiving meal and were also helping her and her husband with a legal matter.

“If I tell my mom no to anything… she will renege on her promises and take the gift back,” she admitted, saying that this made it even harder to stand her ground. Still, she felt her children’s health had to come first.

Commenters largely supported her. One wrote, “They will not attempt a single good practice at preventing the spread of disease… Tell them to have their own diseased holiday this year.”

In a later update, she shared that things had changed after speaking with her father. “THEY ARE NOT COMING OVER,” she wrote. She said her sister became defensive, but her father “put his foot down on my behalf” and promised to talk to her mother to smooth things over.

With that, the family agreed to postpone Thanksgiving “to some other day when people aren’t contagious.”