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Mayan calendar, I love it!!! 
To learn more info about the ideology that's behind this, visit http://webexhibits.org/calendars/calendar-mayan.html, it will explain to you how their calendar worked.
I don't think that they meant Dec. 21st 2012 to mean as an end of time... or an end of the world, as many people with science fiction notions and fantastic prophesies like to imagine (mostly just to stun other people anyways). If you know anything about the Mayan systems of time keeping, you will know that their "Long Count" calendar (which was used to track long time periods, something like centuries and millenia in our notions) was repetitive... that means, it would eventually return to its starting point, unlike our calendars, which can go on counting time in increasing numbers seemingly forever. Mayan "Long Count" calendar had five digits for its marking: 13.0.0.0.0. This was the notation for the beginning and an end date. After that, the next day would be noted as 13.0.0.0.1, the day after as 13.0.0.0.2, and so on, until it would come back to 13.0.0.0.0. And the time span for one cycle of this to repeat would be a little more than five thousand years - multiply 144,000 by 13 and then divide by 365 = 5128.77 year (not (taking into account the leap years, of course). Hence, as you can see, for them the return of the calendar to its starting point would mark the end of one era, and the beginning of another era. And since Mayans were great astrologers, it is even believed (some theories suggest) that they could foretell that a great astronomic even (the alignment of the planes) would happen on Dec. 21st, 2012, and so they set the end date for one era in their "Long Count" calendar to correspond with this date and then calculated and set the start date in their calendar retroactively...
Overall, very interesting stuff to read about and research, in my opinion.
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