Thanks everyone for the input. To clarify for those who found this confusing...  A "Year End Change Freeze" is a Change Freeze (of development work deployed to Production) that takes place end of the year (highest traffic holiday and retail spending times). 

Emir really nailed the heart of the issue:  "In theory an org should be able to make change 24x7x365 using an integrated CI/CD pipeline:

As we don't have a full CI/CD pipeline we still rely on a Change Freeze to ensure stability during those high risk end of year times. I was really wondering if other ServiceNow users that also utilize Change Freezes in  their Production environment have exceptions for particular ServiceNow applications (Knowledge, HAM, SAM etc). Thinking that by nature of the platform production change freezes may not be as necessary vs standalone customer facing applications. 

I was also wondering what is the duration (start and end) of other orgs end of year freeze dates. Just curious if they are fairly short (days) or extensive (month). That's a pretty open ended question and OK if no responses to it.