I'm kinda thinking the confusion was related to "why that date" rather than  "what is the date".  Personally, I don't care.  I have one return that could possibly be affected, but I'm not going to lose a lot of sleep over it.  But for some folks that want to get some returns out the door, that really is mind boggling that Intuit would shut down that early.  Some of us in the trenches do take time off for Christmas but I don't think many of us realized that evidently due to COVID, Christmas had grown from one day to almost one week.