Exclamation Points and Their Sneaky, Weasel-ly Ways

Confession: I was pretty pleased with myself.

Back at the beginning of my writing career, I used exclamation points like they were going out of style. This slowly evolved over time until I not only abhorred them in books (except for when someone is yelling or cheering or such), but I rarely even use them on Noveltea. Now, I must admit they sometimes sneak into my emails and texts like a prison-wide jail break, but that's normally when I'm being frivolous with my writing style anyway.
So, I decided to search When Life Hands You Lymes and see how many exclamation points I had. I figured there would probably be a dozen or so, cause there's some yelling that goes on, plus a surprise party. 
Y'all. I had EIGHTY-SIX exclamation points. No, really. Eighty-six. How in the world? And right there, the pleased-ness (yes, I just coined that word), I felt at my morphing into a non-exclamation-point-using author vanished. So, of course I had to look at each and every one of those exclamation points and see why in the world they were cluttering up my book. 
Thankfully in the space of two sittings I was able to significantly cut down on that scarily excessive amount of exclamation points and return my book to a much more respectful standing in the library of my brain. 
Here are some examples of exclamation points I change to periods or question marks:

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Yet, despite my best efforts there were times when an exclamation point was really needed to convey the way the words was spoken. Take for instance, "Merry Christmas!" is the normal way to greet someone (on Christmas day at least), and if I had just written "Merry Christmas." then the readers would get the impression that Madalyn wasn't actually excited about Christmas. And yeah, we couldn't have that. So, here are some examples of the exclamation points I kept:
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Same thing with birthday greetings. No one texts "Happy Birthday, Best friend." when they're wanting to spread cheer and happiness, right? An exclamation point is practically required with that type of text:


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And then there's the case when someone was surprised and screeched a word in excited happiness:  

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And that, folks, is the saga of my vicious fight with the semi-dreaded exclamation points and how I cut their number from eighty-six down to thirty-seven. I'm still slightly shocked that so many of them worked their way into WLHYL, and that no one pointed them out to me, but I guess maybe they were hidden pretty well... 
What about y'all? Do you have a hard time with those sneaky little bits of punctuation?