It’s Christmas, and it’s certainly not in the spirit of the day to spend any part of it making fun of anyone else for their religious beliefs. So I’ll lay off those that suggested the world would end — or begin to end — on May 21st of this year, with some small fraction of humanity whisked off to an afterlife and the rest of us left here to suffer as human life on earth came to a triumphant and terrifying demise.

It didn’t happen, and our continued, utterly non-Raptured existence on this planet strikes me as at least the seventh-best thing that happened this year.

Plus, though I may not have ever been seriously worried about the coming Apocalypse, I do appreciate the heads up. The people put up billboards. That’s just good looking out.

It turned out they didn’t have what I believed to be a very convincing case, but in the event that someone does have strong evidence the world is going to end in a couple of weeks, I do want to know about it. I’m a serial procrastinator, and I’m inevitably going to have some crap I need to take care of before End of Days. I’d at least pick up my dry cleaning.

Anyhow, like I said: Didn’t happen this time around. So we get more baseball and fried food, and all the other things that’ll be on this countdown. And maybe that little suggestion of rapture-fear, however unlikely, is good for us every once in a while. There’s a bunch of stuff we should celebrate more often that we probably overlook, and this whole existence is pretty damn fragile. It’s probably not going to end like they said, but asteroids are very real bro.