I exported (backup!) all the feeds in The Reader and will start with the following 10 and let us see how the list grows by the end of 2008 
collatodo has been the key focus in the last weeks of 2007 and I thank the people behind the colophon of collatodo
Other inspiring people and posts from 2007 (and excellent posts from the beginning of 2008 )
Whatever do we mean when we say that? Depending on the context, the greeting can mean different things.
Considered etymologically, ‘Happy New Year’ can mean ‘Lucky New Year’. For ‘happy’, when it first appeared in Middle English, meant ‘lucky’, deriving as it did from Old Danish happe, ‘to chance’. We don’t use ‘hap’ to mean ‘luck’ now, but we continue to invoke it unconsciously in a number of other words - besides ‘happy’, ‘happen’, ‘happenstance’, ‘haphazard’, ‘perhaps’, ‘mishap’, ‘hapless’, etc.
So when we wish people a ‘Happy New Year’, we might be said to be wishing them a lucky, fortunate, happening - not haphazard or hapless - New Year.
Does it matter? Not really. Time is new in every moment and any day in the calendar could have served to mark a New Year. New Year’s days are among humanity’s ‘oldest and most universally observed’ festivals, the Encyclopedia Britannica tells us, not because they mark any especial recurrent moment in time but because they promise renewal. It is the idea of the ‘new’ that has drawn humanity since time immemorial to these festivals, not so much the precise day in the year that they occur - Jan 1 or Feb 7 (Chinese New Year in 2008), Sept 6 or Dec 21.
‘Make It New’ - that quintessential modernist slogan is the essential promise at the heart of every New Year’s day. Humanity has celebrated such festivals for more than 4,000 years now, so this wish - for renewal, for restoration, for fresh beginnings - must derive from a deep-seated need that is at once immeasurably old as well as very modern. New Year’s festivals, no matter on which days potentates or customs arbitrarily decide they fall, tie us inextricably to our ancestors in a shared hope for regeneration.
