I also ate way too much, and enjoyed every second -- I did make a stab at some salad, LOL, but mostly yeah, it's an explosion of sugar and fats, and I love it. ;)

I had the most wonderful Christmas, and the holiday eve and day itself was so perfect I wonder why we spend so much time ahead worrying about it all. I've promised not to do that next year. We, human being in general, tend to worry and agonize over so much ahead of time, fighting arguments that don't even exist yet or expecting the worst rather than the most, and then find the things we worried about were so insignificant, that why do it, right? Why not just go with the flow and enjoy it all? So I think my resolution has come a week early. ;)

Anyway... among favorite gifts this year were two amazing sets of DVDs, the entire Superman movie collection from Mike and the X-Men collection from my niece, and then a little Christmas ornament from Mike with a boy monkey giving a girl monkey a banana (get your minds out of the gutter, it's cute!), saying "I'm bananas for you." And a set of really sparkly hair clips from my brother and siste-in-law that I wore both days -- I'm a sucker for sparkly hair bling.

Then, of course, a well-held tradition was supported in making someone cry over their gift -- this time, me. My mother always used to cry over something, and we all enjoyed it (it's just funny, in a funny way, and really the best is when you can get someone else crying, too), but my sister came across some old coins in my mother's bedroom closet, and a note as to how they were supposed to be distributed among her children and grandchildren. Of course, she's been gone for almost 9 years now, and her b'day was Christmas Eve, so she's always in our thoughts, anyway. But my sister and my father divvied up the coins, which had been given to her from her father, and also made copies of the note, which said at the bottom, in her very distinctive handwriting -- with underlining -- "I never spent these, even when I was broke... -- not too subtle there, LOL -- and yeah, frankly, just seeing her handwriting and having this gift had me sobbing like a baby, so I won the crying prize this year. Though I almost made my sister and niece cry too, so almost got points for that... My other sister and her kids are coming down for New Year's and they'll get their coins, and I'm hoping they'll get weepy... LOL

That said, I think you're right that all things in romance novels are distilled to an extent, that the emotions and experiences there are more straight-up than would be in real life, or at least, in real life we'd have different reactions to such things, because in the book we only have a short space to convey it all, so it has to be in sharp relief, and also because I think among so many words, when things are written and not heard or seen, we have to rely on strength of expression and almost melodrama to get the emotion to work. I've always thought of it like actors wearing too much makeup because the people in the back rows have to be able to see them, or how they have to speak so loudly or with affectation. Same difference, I think.

Sometimes there are intersections of life and fiction, I think -- I've experienced them from both sides, my books containing elements of real life, and my life sometimes feeling like a story, but there are always differences, too -- thank goodness! LOL

Merry merry all...

Sam