What defines 'late fall?' Apologies if I'm sounding picky but I'd just like to check that.
Well, Wikipedia says that "holiday season"..
..is generally considered to run from late November to early January
.. whatever that means.
About the rules..
I believe that although this is a "fun" competition, it's still important to have very clear rules because there are awesome award icons involved. If people are allowed to submit whatever (like Chuck Norris etc.), it's going to be unfair against those who
did use the holiday season theme, because they had to deal with this pretty big restriction. If we had an "expert panel" to pick the winners, it would not be that bad because they could weed out random submissions. But because we have a public poll, which for example always seems to favor anything that is related to boobs, the winner of this holiday season competition could very well be a submission that actually has nothing to do with holiday season, which would be a shame. For example, I took a look at all the submissions we've received so far, and there was no "holiday season" in a couple of them, unless I missed something.