@Hanaa Home by itself works as a preposition phrase. Traditionally, it would be called an adverb, but in post-Jespersen linguistics, it would be considered a preposition all by itself. That's why home ends up working as a preposition phrase by itself, much like We took the bus back to New York.

In traditional grammar, prepositions had to have noun phrases as complements, so they didn't know what to call it and stuck the "adverb" label on it, because that's the label they used for everything when they weren't sure what it was. But it isn't like other adverbs, and it is like other prepositions. The only tricky thing is that it doesn't take a complement, so we call it an intransitive preposition in modern grammar.

@Araucaria I would like to post an answer! I need a little time to convert my thoughts into answer format, though :-)

Taking vacation sounds unusual to my ear. I think it might work with certain meanings, but it wouldn't mean quite the same thing as taking a vacation.

At some companies, you can build up an allotment of "vacation" (or "vacation time") measured in hours or days, and then you can choose to take a certain amount of that.

And when I hear the phrase take vacation, the interpretation that occurs to me is using some amount of vacation time.

Like (made-up example): I have thirty hours of vacation saved up. I'm not feeling well, but I'll have to take some vacation next week instead of sick leave because I've been sick too often already, and I can't take any more sick days without going on disability.

In this example I made up, I'm trying to use vacation as a non-count noun.

Whereas in take a vacation, vacation doesn't refer to using an amount of vacation time, but instead refers to an entire trip.

In userr's example, take vacation sounds fine to me but means "take time off of work", and doesn't mean "go on a trip to enjoy oneself".

@Heihej We seem to be in agreement! Yay :-)

For what it's worth, I'm a native speaker of American English, and what I've been typing is just what my intuition tells me. I haven't attempted to confirm my intuition by looking through real examples, and I think vacation may be one of those words that is used differently in British English.

I can never remember exactly how vacation and holiday are used in BrE.

I think the difference between the examples is because count vacation has a slightly different meaning from non-count vacation.

The article is doing what it's normally doing, but the difference in meaning is probably specific to vacation.

@Heihej The second meaning there had not occurred to me.

I suppose that meaning is also possible with non-count vacation, although it isn't what I was talking about.

No, that is definitely not the meaning I was thinking of.

And that is not the meaning in userr's example.

I would have to look through corpora to find an example that fits the "normal activities of law courts, legislatures, etc." being suspended one.

I don't think there's anything wrong with dictionary.com's definition there, I just think it's another meaning, somewhat different, that we hadn't discussed up to that point.