It depends on how you set things up, but for haulers for example you can just set hauling to "nobody does this" and your haulers will have a lot of free time on their hand.

For a workshop, you can "forbid" any of the items used to build the workshop to effectively stop it, you only need to claim/unforbid it later on to re-activate it.

That sounds like a really great idea -- holidays based on things that happened in your fortress, giving dwarves times to take care of the more time-consuming personal needs