I told him the Maya also believed you could make it rain by cutting off a guy's head and rolling it down a flight of stairs, so I wouldn't be concerned.

Of course, most of what I know of Maya culture comes from a Mel Gibson movie, so I decided to search out an informed opinion, and contacted Professor Eleanor Harrison-Buck, who teaches Meso-American studies at the University of New Hampshire.

She knows most of what there is to know about the Mayan calender, and she's not worried.

"I've got plans for Dec. 22, 2012," said Harrison-Buck, laughing. She said she's a bit surprised at the anxiety the looming date has caused, and not just among children.

"I've talked to some adults who are pretty panicked."

For that, you can thank movie industry hucksters, who are pushing "2012" with characteristic shamelessness.

And there's the ever-helpful Internet, where fervent doomsday scenarios are as plentiful as Viagra pop-ups (pardon the pun).

Harrison-Buck said the Maya, culturally, were not as into the whole doomsday thing as we are. They did indeed have a 5,000-year calender that concludes on Dec. 21, 2012, but the calender is more circular and cyclic than linear and terminal, in keeping with the Mayan way of thinking about time and space.

Their calender, she said, included recurring and complementing solar years and ceremonial years, rolling over and feeding into cycles that comprise the much longer 5,000-year calender, which itself was part of an ongoing series of epochal time periods.

The Maya, she said, were not hung up on the end of days. For the Maya, the end of one cycle signaled the beginning of another.

"They would have viewed the new cycle as a time for reorder and renewal. They would not likely have seen it as the end of anything.

"When you look around and see all the recent acceleration in talk about sustainable living and renewable resources, maybe they weren't far off."