Kiritimati is the island in Kiribati often among the first inhabited places to celebrate New Year's Day.
Kiritimati, also called Christmas Island, lies in the central Pacific and uses Kiribati's UTC+14 time zone. Because of that time-zone placement, its local clock reaches January 1 before clocks in almost every other inhabited location. The island is part of the Line Islands, a group administered by Kiribati.
Kiribati moved the International Date Line eastward around its territory in 1994, bringing the Line Islands into the same calendar day as the rest of the country. This made the country one of the first to enter a new date, although the exact order of midnight celebrations depends on time zones and daylight-saving arrangements elsewhere.
Kiritimati should not be confused with Tarawa, Kiribati's capital, which is in the Gilbert Islands and uses a different time zone. The name is the local rendering of “Christmas.”