I think you can't avoid the fact that these holiday weeks are different from regular weeks. If you "change freeze" then you also freeze out the little fixes and perf tuning that usually happens across these systems, because they're not "critical".

And then inevitably it turns out that there's a special marketing/product push, with special pricing logic that needs new code, and new UI widgets, causing a huge traffic/load surge, and it needs to go out NOW during the freeze, and this is revenue, so it is critical to the business leaders. Most of eng, and all of infra, didn't know about it, because the product team was cramming until the last minute, and it was kinda secret. So it turns out you can freeze the high-quality little fixes, but you can't really freeze the flaky brand-new features ...

It's just a struggle, and I still advise to forget the freeze, and try to be reasonable and not rush things (before, during, or after the freeze).

Any big tech company with large peak periods disagrees with you. It's absolutely worth freezing non-critical changes.

Urgent business change needs to go through? Sure, be prepared to defend to a vp/exec why it needs to go in now.

Urgent security fix? Yep same vp will approve it.

It's a no-brainer to stop your typical changes which aren't needed for a couple of weeks. By the way, it doesn't mean your whole pipeline needs to stop. You can still have stuff ready to go to prod or pre prod after the freeze

Some shops conduct game days as the freeze approaches.

https://wa.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/2020-07-02T19-33-2... / https://archive.md/uaJlR