Kiritimati, whose New Year's celebrations are among the earliest in the world, is part of Kiribati.
Kiritimati is also called Christmas Island and is the largest island in the Line Islands group. It lies in the central Pacific Ocean and uses Line Islands Time, which is UTC+14. That time zone places the island ahead of locations farther west, so its residents reach January 1 before most of the world's population.
Kiribati moved the International Date Line eastward for its eastern islands in 1995. The change brought the country's island groups onto the same calendar day and made the Line Islands the first inhabited places to enter a new date.
“First” depends on the comparison being made and on inhabited locations. Kiritimati is commonly described as one of the first inhabited places to welcome the new year, but the whole world does not enter January 1 at one instant. Other Pacific islands follow at later times as midnight moves westward.