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Order in which countries enter the new year. The chronological order in which countries enter in the new year is determined by the time zone of that particular country or region. The headers display the time (in UTC) and timezone.
Dec 30, 2022 · The New Year begins earliest in Kiritimati (or Christmas Island) in the Pacific Ocean, which enters 2023 at 10am UK time on Friday 31 December – 14 hours ahead of Brits. Celebrations begin in...
Dec 31, 2021 · 31 December 2021. By Colin Paterson, Entertainment correspondent. BBC. Years & Years used to be a trio, but the group announced this year that Olly Alexander would continue the name as a solo...
Dec 29, 2021 · Every country recognizes the new year at midnight on January 1, but they don't celebrate it in the same order. These will be the very first and last countries to say goodbye to 2021 when...
- Michele Debczak
- Overview
- First country to celebrate
- Last country to celebrate
- More time zone madness
- How does Antarctica ring in the new year?
Each day starts at the international date line. But countries are free to observe time as they see fit—resulting in a number of calendar quirks.
Each day on Earth lasts approximately 24 hours. But on New Year’s Eve, it takes a little bit longer than that to wrap up the last day of the year and ring in the new one.
That’s because of a quirk of the international date line, the official starting and ending point of each day. The idea of the date line was introduced at a conference in 1884 in which the world sought to create order with the rise of railroads and international travel. The international date line roughly follows the 180th meridian north to south through the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It is located halfway around the world from the prime meridian, which crosses Greenwich, England, in the United Kingdom.
Countries are free to decide which side of the international date line they want to be on—resulting in a line that zigs and zags its way between the North and South Poles.
(New Year isn’t just on January 1. Learn about Lunar New Year.)
Making things even more confusing, countries set their own times. There are currently 38 local times in use, some set off from Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) by 30 or 45 minute increments rather than an hour, says Paul Eggert, a computer scientist at the University of California Los Angeles who maintains the authoritative global Time Zone Database.
The first land masses to greet the new year are Kiritimati Island and a string of 10 other mostly uninhabited atolls in the central Pacific Ocean. One of the 33 islands that make up the Republic of Kiribati, Kiritimati is located almost directly south of Hawaii, within the same line of longitude—but celebrates New Year a full day earlier.
(The amazing rebirth of the reefs of Kiribati's Line Islands.)
The last inhabited places to celebrate are the islands of Niue and American Samoa to the southwest of Kiribati in the South Pacific. The day technically ends an hour later in the U.S. territories of Baker Island and Howland Island, but both are uninhabited, Eggert says. (And if no one is there to see the time change, does it really change at all?)
(Learn about Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year.)
But there are also plenty of time zone oddities away from the international date line. China, for example, has only one time zone even though geographically the country could have as many as five. The entire country formally observes Beijing time—which has proven an inconvenience for cities like Urumqi, which lies 2,000 miles west of the capital. There, the sun may not rise until 10 a.m. Beijing time.
Eggert says this is why, in practice, the city observes two times simultaneously. “Formally it’s on Beijing time like the rest of China but informally most people run in a separate time,” he says.
(Learn about Hijri, the Islamic New Year.)
This also means that if you cross China’s western border on New Year’s Eve, you might have to set your watch back as much as three-and-a-half hours. Why a half hour? That’s because some countries around the world—including Afghanistan, India, and Burma—use half-hour or quarter-hour deviations from standard time.
Meanwhile, Antarctica may appear to stretch across all of the time zones. But Eggert says that is far from the reality on the ground. Each research station scattered across the continent observes the time of the country that supplies it—meaning McMurdo Station is on New Zealand time (UTC+12) and Palmer is on Chilean time (UTC-3).
But ultimately, Eggert says, “the clock doesn’t really matter at the South Pole. When you’ve got a six-month day and six-month night, time is really arbitrary.”
Wed, Dec 31, 2025. New Year’s Eve is one of the largest global celebrations because it marks the last day of the year in the Gregorian calendar, December 31, before the New Year. Count down to the New Year no matter where you are in the world.
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Jan 25, 2016 · New Year's Day 2025 in the United Kingdom. New Year's Day on January 1 marks the beginning of the New Year in the Gregorian calendar. It is a bank holiday in the United Kingdom, where people mark the day with unique customs and traditions. New Year fireworks behind Big Ben, London.
