With all do respect to the replies that say "you misunderstood SWTOR" it says "up to five days early, which means you are not guarnteed 2-5 days early".. your not exactly correct.. it is decietful/clever advertising on SWTORs part.
If SWTOR has no intention of allowing December pre-orders to play untill the 18/19 or so, then the advertisement should read (to the December pre-order audience) "PREORDER - and play 1-2 days early, not FIVE. If this was the case, the advertisement to play FIVE days early would have appealed to the September, October, November audience specifically.
BUT This is just speculation and time will tell how genuine SWTOR was with their advertisment to the individuals who preorder in the last couple weeks.
For the record, I did pre-order in December with the notion that I will get to play early. For some odd reason I thought I would be playing with everyone else on launch day. I took the "may" part of the advertisement to mean that early access launch day was not yet specific within the 5 day period... as opposed to "waves" of launches throughout that period.
Im not mad as I did not expect to be playing this early. Just irritated with the lack of clarification from a game of this caliber.