Kiribati is widely associated with the world's earliest official New Year's midnight because of its UTC+14 time zone.
Kiribati is an island country spread across the Pacific Ocean, and its Line Islands use UTC+14, the world's most advanced civil time zone. As a result, Kiritimati, also called Christmas Island, is among the first inhabited places to reach January 1 each year.
The position is connected to the International Date Line and a time-zone change made by Kiribati in 1994. Before that change, the country's islands were divided across different calendar dates. Moving the eastern islands to the same side of the date line helped unify the national calendar and created the unusual situation in which Kiribati could enter a new day before most other places.
“First country” can be imprecise because New Year arrives across a sequence of islands and time zones, and some uninhabited locations may share or precede particular times. The dependable fact is Kiribati's UTC+14 Line Islands and their early midnight.