Kiritimati is in the UTC+14 time zone, making it one of the first inhabited places to enter a new calendar year.
Kiritimati, also called Christmas Island, is part of the Republic of Kiribati in the central Pacific Ocean. Kiribati moved the International Date Line eastward around its eastern islands in 1995, placing the Line Islands on the same calendar day as the country’s other island groups.
Because UTC+14 is the world’s furthest-forward civil time offset, Kiritimati reaches midnight before almost all other inhabited locations. This is why it frequently appears in lists about the first places to celebrate New Year.
The phrase “first place” can be misleading if treated as a single universal title: nearby islands and locations share the same offset. The precise fact is that Kiritimati uses UTC+14 and is among the earliest inhabited places to begin the year.