How ridiculous of a question. Of course ScrumMasters can take vacations. Whether or not things fall apart while you're out shredding the slopes in Tahoe, however, is entirely up to you.
During my career, I ran into those managers (I'm not suggesting SM's are managers. Just play along...) who feel that things falling apart in their absence is a sign of how needed they are. They take joy when people say "don't ever leave again, we need you," upon return to the office. It makes them feel powerful and probably provides some sense of job security. These types are the micro-managers that we love so much.
In my first managerial position as Director of Web Development for a $10-20 million a year company, my boss was a task-manager and encouraged me to be as well. I felt guilty taking vacation because emails still had to be answered, consistent direction was required, and processes still needed to be managed. If I ever did take vacation, I ended up answering most emails & calls and even got chewed out for lack of availability for a few days whilst in Germany for the 2006 World Cup. I never used up all of my annual vacation time and rarely took more than two days off at a time as a result.
Leaving that company was one of the best moves of my life for many reasons, but in large part because being a full-time ScrumMaster allowed me to get my guilt-free vacations back. We aren't managers, task-managers, slave-drivers. We are coaches and plows for teams to use to get projects done. If you know what you're doing, you've already put the processes in place that allows the team to continue trucking towards release as you slip out of the office. The agile cadence is so ingrained into the team's ethos that come Friday before release the team knows to meet with stakeholders in the board room and demo their new features. On Monday post release, the team congregates again with the product owner to review the product backlog and commits to another sprint.
One trap ScrumMasters can fall into is the feeling that they are running all of these meetings. These are not your meetings, they are for the team. I have made this mistake numerous times and if repeated can make you appear to be a task-manager which is counter-productive to the goal of agile software development. The team commits to work and then splits off to self-organize in order to meet their commitments much more efficiently than we can instruct each developer every step of the way. The ScrumMaster is there to make sure that the meetings move along, the team doesn't get stuck on any one discussion for too long, the team is free to speak their mind, outside forces don't steamroll the process, etc. An empowered team can run these meetings without a ScrumMaster present.
Of course being a ScrumMaster does more than participate in sprint meetings. We bust up or navigate around road-blocks, but a well-oiled agile team should have all of the tools at their disposal to do so on their own. If you have a top agile Product Owner, you're unlikely to get someone who will wedge their needs into the process without the team saying "sorry, back in line. k thnks." The Product Owner can back them up should this happen.
Like in soccer, where everything is improvised from the opening whistle, well-coached agile teams are prepared to tackle challenges on their own. All the coach can do is sit back and watch it unfold for 90 minutes while hoping that he did all he could to prepare them throughout the week.
Despite being just days from release of our 6 week site rebuild, I just got back from an extended weekend in Colorado and was able to realize the hard-work that I put in developing processes & instilling agile methodology at our company. I made sure to schedule the meetings prior to my trip to ensure rooms were available & the proper people attended, and the team took it from there.
Only a few things were missed: JIRA issue statuses were never updated and the team neglected to review a QA document, but all-in-all the business continued as usual and the project is still on track for release.
Now to figure out how to convince my boss that I'm still needed....
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