Kiribati observes New Year's Eve first among the world's inhabited places because of its UTC+14 time zone.
Kiribati is an island country spread across a large area of the central Pacific. Its Line Islands, including Kiritimati, use Line Islands Time, which is UTC+14. That time-zone arrangement places those islands ahead of locations farther west, so their midnight arrives among the earliest inhabited midnight celebrations on Earth.
The country moved the International Date Line eastward around its islands in 1994. Before that change, some Kiribati islands were separated by different calendar dates, making government and communications difficult. The adjustment placed the country's islands on the same calendar day, although they still use three time zones.
Kiritimati is often called Christmas Island and is part of Kiribati, but it is not the same place as Australia's Christmas Island. Tonga, Samoa, and New Zealand also celebrate early, yet the UTC+14 designation gives Kiribati's Line Islands the earliest official time-zone position.