I used to work Christmas pretty often. One job, PC support could be brutally busy. The other, tech support for some high end networking equipment was very quiet. I loved working holidays there. Mostly just played video games. Always strange how the jobs that pay less often are more work / tiresome.
Much of that depends on corporate culture. Often it is the lower-paid and more junior people who get the bad shifts. But in my organization (military) it is normal for the more senior people to work those shifts. Responsibility for mission-critical tasks falls upwards. If you are only going to have one person on shift, then that person cannot be a trainee. So all the people I interacted with this morning were relatively senior within their team.