I'm sorry to hear about your troubles. I had the same thing happen to me a bit over a year ago. Unfortunatetly eBay has never properly implemented a holiday mode, so your title is really the only solution that works, don't go on holidays.
We put our store on holiday mode and monitored sales. We contacted anyone who bought something and told them when we would be shipping and offered to cancel their order. None of our customers made any complaints, but ebay still penalised us and it took about 6-9 months for our account to properly recover, at least it seemed that way. Our sales were very quiet for months.
Other than not going on holidays, here are the options:
1) End all your listings. This is probably the safest option, but you lose things like sales history, and it will be hard to get momentum going again, so it's not really recommended.
2) Turn on holiday mode, this puts a little banner up telling customers that you are away, but it's very easy to miss this banner when you are scanning through dozens of listings.
3) Hide your listings, this helps, but it only hides your listings from search, people can still find your listings from things like direct links.
4) Extend your handling time to a couple of days after your return. This will prevent you from getting defects on your account.
5) Have a friend or family member do your shipping while you are away.
I'm going away later in the year, and will probably do 2, 3, and 4, as well as making my own banner in my description advising customers of the extended delays.
There is no way to fix any of your problems after the fact, other than maybe by sweet talking someone at eBay. You just have to take your lumps and not give up before your store recovers.
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