Kiritimati is often identified as the first inhabited place to welcome the New Year.
Kiritimati, also known as Christmas Island, is part of Kiribati in the central Pacific. It uses UTC+14, the world's most advanced civil time zone, so its midnight arrives before midnight in most other inhabited locations.
The island's position is connected to the International Date Line and to Kiribati's 1994 decision to shift its eastern islands to the same calendar day as the rest of the country. That change removed a large time-zone gap within Kiribati and helped create the familiar “first to celebrate” description.
The claim is a practical time-zone convention, not a statement that one exact beach is always first under every definition. International Date Line boundaries and inhabited locations matter, and “first” refers to the civil calendar rather than to sunrise or the first fireworks broadcast.