Five months from today is Christmas Eve.  What will you be doing on Christmas Eve:  relaxing with family and friends, ready to celebrate or running around madly, over-stressed and overspent, trying to accomplish evrything last minute?

If you'd rather be the first, the decisions you make now are essential.  You can set your budget (and start saving toward it), make travel plans, begin crafting handmade gifts, update your address lists, review your recipe files to identify the ones you want to try this year, begin blocking out time on your calendar for major tasks (decorating, wrapping, baking, card-writing), even start your shopping!  (Full disclosure:  I bought several Christmas over the weekend and plan to buy more in August.)

You don't need to pre-empt your celebration.  I detest seeing Christmas decorations up in stores before Halloween, but you can plan and make sure you've laid the necessary groundwork.  After all, using a summer sale to stock up on non-perishable ingredients for cookies isn't going to diminish your celebration.  It just means you don't have to hope that the all-night covenience store carries vanilla!