Have you started watching holiday movies on Netflix? Getting ready to travel for Thanksgiving?  Did you light candles in the dark night?  Holidays are emotional high-points and low-points for people. Family get-together are sometimes as tense as they are joyful.  

However holiday romance, particularly Christmas romances are a huge romance sub-genre. Do you have favorites?  Do you have recs for romances about other holidays? Why do you love holiday romances? 

 These three romances do a fabulous job depicting the ups and downs of holidays. The long-awaited reunions, the bittersweet or down-right awkward moments and even tensions that threaten those celebrations. 

A Taste of Blessings by Suleikha Snyder is a delightful novella about Tiya,an almost 40,  good-girl "with all the bad-girl trappings", tattoos, short-hair, & singleness, who has been nursing a crush for fourteen years for perpetually unavailable Arnav. First he was married, and no divorced still out-of-bounds. She sees him every time she comes home and she is ready to suffer her crush once more but this time he flirts back.  I loved the love of family here. Arnav loves his sons, and wants them to be happy, hoping one day his oldest might be brave enough to bring a man he loves home and similarly Tiya's father's love is undeniable. Doting, loving and determined to smooth things for her.  I loved the vibrancy and joy of the Durga Puja celebrations, and how their faith and traditions matter to the MCs.   Originally available in the Silver Bells Anthology, it s now available in a short-story collection along with other fabulous shorts by Snyder in Dil or No Dil).

Never Again by Stacey Agdern, from Rogue Acts, in the weeks leading into Chanukah, and it deals with the alarming rise of Antisemitism that we are seeing and is about being lights in the darkness.   Sam is a Jewish superhero-playing actor who is determined to use his fame & wealth and the platform it gives him to make a difference, from funding small donor-choose style projects for teachers to lending his influence to help promote a  documentary on Jewish resistance that moved him.  Deb, is the filmmaker’s sister & coincidentally the preschool teacher whose school-fund projects Sam’s been funding. While the pacing was a bit choppy at times,  I loved how Agdern portrayed the role of faith and religious practice in their life. It was poignant last winter and even more so now.

Cecilia Grant's Christmas Gone Perfectly Wrong is a delightful snowed-in holiday romance with a stuffy uptight hero, who loses it for the heroine, when they are stranded together after just about everything goes wrong on a snowy Christmas eve. I loved the way Grant presented how grief has affected both their families.

What holiday romances do you love?

A list of all the prompts and links to all the posts so far.