What country first receives the New Year?

Each year, as the world prepares to bid farewell to the calendar and welcome a new beginning, there is a question that sparks global curiosity: What is the first country to celebrate the New Year? The answer is shared by Samoa and Kiribati, two island nations in the Pacific that, due to their geographical location, are the first to receive the date change.

Both territories are located near the international date line, an artificial boundary established in 1884 that separates two consecutive days on the calendar. Thanks to their position near the western side of this line, which roughly follows the 180° meridian, although with multiple deviations, Samoa and Kiribati are ahead of the rest of the world, even countries like New Zealand and other Pacific islands. The International Date Line runs around the planet from pole to pole, but it doesn’t do so in a straight line. Its course zigzags to adapt to political borders and island territories, such as the easternmost part of Russia, the Aleutian Islands of Alaska, and several islands in the Pacific Ocean. When crossing it westward, one day is gained; when doing so in the opposite direction, one goes back in the calendar, a particularity that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of the United States (NOAA) describes as a kind of “time travel“.

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In the case of Kiribati, its status as one of the first places to receive the New Year was not always the case. Until the mid-1990s, the International Date Line divided the country into two distinct days, which complicated administration and commercial activities. To solve this problem, the Government promoted a change that moved the line more than 2,400 kilometers east, allowing all the islands of the country to share the same calendar day. Thanks to this decision, Kiribati consolidated its privileged position on the world time map, along with Samoa, as the first territories to say goodbye to the old year and welcome the new, while much of the planet is still waiting for the clock to strike midnight.