The Technical Side of the Holiday Season

Why is it when most departments get into the Holiday Season they wind down and go into cruise control while the IT/development department goes into overdrive to get all the work that they are behind finished? I guess it may be due to the fact that most IT departments are building supporting technologies for the departments that have the holidays to settle down. Now this is not the case (in most instances) for companies that produce technology for customers. Would it not be nice to allow the entire company to have some down time during the Holidays? Let me know if my thinking is wrong. I have worked at IT shops that viewed the Holidays as a time to work harder to get all the stuff that was delayed from the current year. Makes for a unpleasant time for the development staff. I can say that I will have a wind down period for the next 2 weeks to really have the quiet time to think about the design I am working on.