The end is here, or merely near?

Gift-buying procrastinators seek any and all reasons to postpone buying Christmas presents. And during this holiday season, they have found a doozy — the Mayan prediction that the world will end today.

Hey, if that forecast holds up, all of that time, thinking and money spent on those Yuletide gifts would have been wasted.

Then again, if the world doesn’t end today, other prophecies of imminent oblivion are bound to emerge. And eventually, one of them might even be right.

But in honor of the Mayans’ end timing, rather than waiting for Christmas or New Year’s Eve (assuming that we last that long), “New Age” partiers from around the world have been flocking to the Riviera Maya this week to celebrate, if not the end of it all, the winter solstice.

That event also just happens to occur today.

As Scripps Howard News Service reported Tuesday: “Many doomsday websites touted the end of the world as happening at Chichen Itza, where the pyramids were constructed so precisely that on the spring and vernal equinoxes, the shadow of what appears to be a serpent falls on the main court. ... But no such shadow appears at the site on the winter solstice.”

We’ll take that as an upbeat sign that the world will survive this day — and night.

But if it does, remember, that will leave only three more shopping days until Christmas.