We're Still Here

Well, we're still here.  Honestly, the best part about the end of the world hoax is all the party planning and celebrations that were created. (My husband and I took in a matinee.....he asked me to go to a movie with him to celebrate.  I asked him what time the world would end...we didn't know...so decided on a matinee just to be safe.  Uh-huh - quirky thinking at its best.)

So just to help clarify the situation, I want to share the blog below which helped me understand the bigger picture and just what it meant that the Mayan calendar "ended" today.  Actually, it was only ONE of their calendars.

So whether you choose to read the thoughts below, or not, hope you had a WONDERFUL day yesterday!!!

http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2012/12/18/maya_apocalypse_2012_doomsday_end_of_the_world_prophecies_are_nonsense.html

It had as its basic units a day (called a k’in) and a 360-day period called a tun. The Maya understood that a physical year was five days longer than a tun, and had other calendars to deal with that. They had longer units, too, like the ka’tun—just shy of 20 years—and most importantly for apocalypse aficionados, the b’ak’tun—roughly 394 of our years. The starting point for their calendar (Year Zero, if you like) is 3114 B.C., the date they figured the Earth was created.

Knowing all this, we can match their calendar to ours and convert any date they used to our more familiar system. If you do the math, you’ll find that we are nearing the end of the 13^th b’ak’tun. In fact, it ends on Dec. 21, 2012.

That’s today. Friday. Cue the spooky music.

The thing is, there is no suggestion, not even a hint, in Maya writing that they thought the end of this current b’ak’tun had any connection to doomsday. It’s entirely possible it may have even been thought of as a time of celebration (just like we celebrate New Year’s Eve).

The Maya also had bigger units of time, including the piktun (which was either 13 or 20 b’ak’tun), and the alautun, which was—get this—63 million years! So it doesn’t sound like they were predicting the end of the world ever, let alone by this weekend.

Anyway, it hardly matters. Just like our calendar, theirs was based on cycles. At the end on a cycle, you reset all the current units and move the biggest one up a notch. It’s what we do on December 31: Reset to the first day of the first month, and increment the year by one. Happy New Year! Same thing with the Long Count. After the last day of the 13^th b’ak’tun, they’d start over at the next one.