Kiribati celebrates New Year's Eve on Kiritimati, one of the world's first inhabited places to enter the new year.
Kiritimati, also called Christmas Island, is part of the Republic of Kiribati. It lies in the central Pacific and uses UTC+14, the world's most advanced civil time zone. As a result, the island reaches midnight before almost all other inhabited locations.
Kiribati moved the International Date Line eastward around its eastern islands in 1994. The change aligned the country's scattered island groups on the same calendar day and helped make Kiritimati famous for being among the first places to welcome a new date and a new year.
The distinction “first” depends on the comparison being made. Kiritimati is often described as the first inhabited place to enter the new year, but other islands and settlements share or closely follow the same time-zone boundary. It is not the same as the uninhabited Pacific islands sometimes cited in date-line discussions.