MadMonkey: We got extra vacation days/year to compensate for the fact that there's to block out period for holidays. Considering this is an international site, time outs would hardly happen if for every holiday somewhere time control is disabled for that day.

Of course, Christmas is only a "problem" for people who 1) don't have holidays left, 2) play games with a time control of 24hours/move or less, 3) aren't taking the time to move on Christmas, and 4) actually have to move that day. Considering that a combination of 1) and 2) is bad anytime, not only at Christmas, I'd say that it's just bad planning, and rules shouldn't be reinstated because of that.