The Stars That Usher Evening Rose

My Humanities lecture today was about the tribes in Central America. While the professor was talking about the Mayans he mentioned that they predicted the end of the world would be December 23, 2012. This raised a lot of questions in my mind. As in where did they get the date from? While spending a few seconds looking it up supposedly the 23 came from the letter "W" the 23rd letter in the alphabet. But why the letter "W" and why the year 2012? Knowing the Mayans were very good astronomers then do they think we are going to be killed off by a large meteor like the dinosaurs were or in some other way related to astronomy? These were all questions that came to mind plus some when he mentioned the date. I plan to look more up on this to try and answer some of these questions because I would like to know where the date came from. I also could not help but notice the closeness of the date to Christmas. I know that Christmas has nothing to do with the date since obviously the Mayans did not have Christmas, But I still found it interesting. I am sure as that date gets closer and closer we will start hearing more and more about it. Hell now its just over 7 and 1/2 years away. Not all that long when you really think about it. Here is to hoping they are wrong, which they probably are but as long as that date is in the future then who the fuck knows. Anything is possible, course it is all absurd anyway. :P