While most of us will have popped the champagne corks by Monday to welcome in the New Year, for a full 26 hours it will still be 2023 in one part of the world.
It's worth remembering that January 1 is an entirely arbitrary construct of our Gregorian Calendar.
Most solar calendars begin the year regularly at or near the northern winter solstice, while cultures that observe a lunisolar or lunar calendar celebrate their Lunar New Year at less fixed points relative to the solar year.
In the Gwaun Valley of Wales, the new year is traditionally celebrated on January 12, in accordance with the Julian Calendar followed there until 1752.
The Chinese will celebrate their new year in six weeks, on the day we call February 16.
READ MORE: Edinburgh to stay dry and chilly for Hogmanay celebrations
For Iranians, it won't happen until March 21.
If you are devoted to the Gregorian Calendar and want it to stay 2023 as long as possible where would you go?
Howland and Baker Islands are the last places on earth to see the new year every January 1, with the oceanic country Kiribati the first.
On some of their closest neighbors, the Line Islands one thousand miles to the east, it's already been 2018 for twenty-six hours by the time those islands see midnight.
READ MORE: How Scotland became the home of Hogmanay
The islands are two tiny, uninhabited atolls forty miles apart in the Pacific, barely north of the Equator.
Baker Island lies almost halfway between Hawaii and Australia.
Both have been claimed as territories of the United States since 1857, though the United Kingdom considered them part of the British Empire between 1897 and 1936.
The United States secretly sent over 100 Hawaiian men to settle these extinct volcanoes and clear airstrips there in the 1930s, so the U.S. government could claim them for aviation use.
When Amelia Earhart disappeared in 1937, she was headed for Howland Island.
Baker has no natural fresh water sources. It is treeless, with sparse vegetation consisting of four kinds of grass,[22] prostrate vines and low-growing shrubs.
The island, with its surrounding waters, is primarily a nesting, roosting, and foraging habitat for seabirds, waders and marine wildlife.
For 26 hours, it will still be 2023 on the islands that time forgot, while most people are nursing their January 1 hangover.
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