Kiribati is the island nation that celebrates New Year's Eve on Kiritimati, one of the earliest inhabited places to enter the new year.
Kiritimati, also called Christmas Island, lies in the central Pacific and uses the UTC+14 time zone. Because the International Date Line was moved eastward for Kiribati in 1995, the country's Line Islands became among the first inhabited areas on Earth to reach a new calendar day, including January 1.
Kiritimati is part of Kiribati's Line Islands and is not the same island as Australia's Christmas Island. The “first” description depends on the definition being used: it commonly refers to inhabited locations and time-zone boundaries, not to the first sunrise in every astronomical sense. Nearby Pacific nations such as Tonga and Samoa also celebrate early, but Kiritimati is especially associated with UTC+14.