We did different things for summer when we were homeschooling—sometimes totally free like in the old days, sometimes a year of math in 2½ months, sometimes summer P.E. was martial arts. Our children have turned out well and as Catholics better than me (probably my wife's influence). I'm glad to hear that Sean had a good confessional experience with Fr. Beck, but I would have seen the name on the confessional and turned away as he turned his back to me while I was still politely talking.
In actual practice, we do homeschool in ten months, with a two-month summer/fall vacation, usually the months of August and September (June and July are just too hot where we live, crank the AC and stay inside). We normally take a roughly three-week Christmas break, but OTOH we generally don't do secular holidays.
There's no ideological reason for that, we just prefer to take "holidays" as desired, no pattern to it, whenever we need a day off, and to take off 4th of July, Memorial Day, and so on, on top of that, would just run us that much shorter on summer vacation.