The tiny South Pacific nation of Samoa did not need a time machine to leap past Friday and into the future. Having decided to move on, 1,86,000 Samoans and 1,500 neighbours in Tokelau merely tore up a day in the calendar. While the nation was mighty pleased with the chronological and geographical pride of having been the first in the world to welcome 2012, crossing westward across the International Date Line to synchronise their day-date and do business more effectively with Australia and New Zealand seemed wise enough.
The Polynesians, who spent 119 years east of the dateline, have more ties to the large islands in the Antipodes to their east than the USA now. The workers were happy as they were given wages for the day lost. The 767 Samoans who lost their birthdays were told to celebrate a day before or a day after and the adventurous could celebrate New Year twice by taking a 30-minute flight to nearby American Samoa on the other side of the dateline.
The Seventh Day Adventists were not pleased with the leap because they observe the Biblical Sabbath on Saturdays and the debate is over whether the Sabbath should continue to be a Saturday or the new Samoan Sunday. The knotty spiritual issue will doubtless be resolved soon. The calendar, after all, is only a chronological convenience and the Gregorian version, which replaced the Julian, is just 430 years old and 2012 has universal relevance only because the Anno Domini count is most commonly used.