The main holidays in Australia for most people are the summer ones (late December - late January). School is closed, people are at the beach and things get very quiet. This is when I used to take most of my annual leave, and because I worked at universities that would close from just before Christmas until after New Year's day anyway, I could often take from four to five weeks off.
It was my pattern between 2004 and 2025 to leave my laptop at work and not respond to email or read Twitter for that entire period (the summer period spanning the end of 2013 to the start of 2014 was the first deviation from this pattern - I was based at DANS in The Hague as a visiting fellow). This work-communication detox allowed me to actually relax, slow down, and prepare for the year to come.
Associated with such a long period of time away I also needed to set an out-of-office email autoreply. By that stage of the year, I was usually feeling a little tired (and thus more 'creative') and this was reflected in the message text. I also found that jetlag associated with international travel helped to free my creative side in useful ways. From 2016, I chose to "adapt" well-known poems (I am not the only person who does this, which is reassuring).
Here is the archive of my holiday auto-replies to the end of 2025. The year is the year of the Christmas in question, the poet is who I used for inspiration). Now that I have formally resigned paid employment, I am not sure whether to maintain this tradition - I have enjoyed it as a creative outlet, so we will see.