Any plans yet for Dec. 21, 2012? You might want to get them down on your calendar — the Gregorian calendar, not the Mayan calendar, which ends on that night after a 5,126-year run.

Allen J. Christenson already knows what he'll be doing in three years, the night the world is supposed to end: "I'll be drinking hot cocoa, probably decorating the Christmas tree. Then I'll brush my teeth and go to bed."

Christenson, a professor of pre-Columbian art history and literature at Brigham Young University, expects that he'll awaken on Dec. 22, 2012, open his front door to get the newspaper and — surprise! — find that nothing has changed.

He doesn't anticipate finding his house in Australia after a massive polar shift, space aliens parked in his driveway or his neighborhood ablaze from solar flares. Oh, he might need to suit up to shovel some white stuff off the sidewalks, he expects, but that's about it.

"Every time the sun goes down, the earth dies, and when the sun comes up, it's reborn," says Christenson, who went through initiation to become a Mayan priest in 1978 and has studied ancient calendars at length.

"This is all just so laughable," he says. "People want to have some kind of spiritual awakening in their lives, but why pick on the poor Maya? Ask the Maya what they think about the world coming to an end in 2012, and they'll say, 'What are you silly gringos talking about? You're getting all worked up about nothing.' "

With Hollywood's "2012" disaster movie opening next month and rumors about the world's imminent demise circulating on the Internet, Christenson thought that Halloween week was a good time to share a Free Lunch chat and clear up a few misconceptions about the Mayan calendar.

"The Maya never said that the world was going to end on Dec. 21, 2012," he says. "In fact, there's only one stone text of thousands that even mentions that date."

Plenty of other ancient Mayan inscriptions have been found with dates that extend far beyond 2012, says Christenson, 52, a former dentist who decided that history was much more interesting than filling cavities.

"They were almost desperate to communicate dates and pin down what was going on in the skies," he says, "so they had numerous calendars — not just the 'long count' calendar that ends in 2012. There's another calendar with a much longer cycle that ends in a year that starts with 42 and has 27 zeroes. Obviously, they didn't plan on the world ending anytime soon."