Kiribati is the Pacific island country that includes Kiritimati, one of the first inhabited places to enter a new year.
Kiritimati, also called Christmas Island, lies in the central Pacific and is part of Kiribati’s Line Islands. The island uses UTC+14, the world’s most advanced civil time zone, so its midnight arrives before midnight in most other inhabited locations. That makes Kiritimati a frequent subject of New Year’s Eve time-zone comparisons.
Kiribati moved the International Date Line around its eastern islands in 1994. The change aligned the country’s scattered islands on the same calendar day, ending a situation in which different parts of Kiribati were separated by a date boundary despite belonging to one nation.
Being among the first places to reach January 1 does not mean Kiritimati is always the first land on Earth to see sunrise or that every island in Kiribati celebrates simultaneously under identical local conditions. The distinction concerns civil time and the inhabited locations using it.