At midnight last Tuesday when pastors in Ghana were optimistically screaming themselves hoarse at watchnight services, choirs sang loud halleluyas, bells pealed and fire crackers boomed to welcome 2014, people in Kiribati had already welcomed the new year 14 hours earlier and may be settling down to lunch.
Kiribati, also called Christmas Island, is located on an island nation in the Pacific Ocean and is home to a population of 5,586. Here, New Year�s eve is celebrated with parties, public events, feasting and a countdown to midnight- all these when it was only 10am on Tuesday in Ghana.
The international Date Line, an imaginary line by which dates and times are generally reckoned runs from the north to the south pole, through the Pacific Ocean and makes Kiribati the first inhabited area on earth to see daylight of a new day.
New Zealand, Australia, Japan and a few other countries followed on the heels of Kiribati. They welcomed the new year 2014 by the time clocks in Ghana read 3pm. At par with Ghana were UK, Morocco, Portugal and 20 others who shared the exact midnight hour together. But they were not the last to do so. The USA and France, among others entered 2014 10 hours after Ghana and the last country to receive the new year was Samea.
In Accra, although most of the activities to welcome 2014 centred as usual around church services, the dominant theme of �crossover� was given a regular meaning by many young men who crossed over from pubs into chapels just in the nick of time to receive blessings by pastors and thereafter crossed over again to pubs to complete the new year celebrations.
<<Print>>