If you have a shipping date of 13th December you may just about get the iMac before
Christmas. My 20" iMac G5 BTO actually shipped 2 days after my original shipping date (a
month after the order) but then took another 10 days to actually arrive. (AFAIK all iMac
G5's are built in China, only PowerMacs are built in Ireland). After the shipping
notification I was able to track it's shipment by Kuhne&Nagle to Luxembourg (took about a
week to be booked on a flight and then was stuck in a warehouse over the weekend), it was
then transferred to Holland for delivery by TNT which took a couple of days and again I
could track it's shipment on the Web. As it turned out a thread started on the Apple
Discussions iMac forum about delivery of this shipment, there were about a dozen of us
waiting for our iMacs from the same plane load and all arrived within 24hrs of each other.
The iMac eventually arrived one day shy of 6 weeks after the order - but was well worth
the wait