Samoa is jumping forward in time by one day. What a wonderful notion: that you can just choose, as a community or a nation, to change where you are in the week; that you can decide, by a sheer act of collective will, when you go to bed this Tuesday evening, that when you wake up the following morning it will be Thursday – and no-one is going to worry too much about what happened to the Wednesday in between, where it went, or what its absence means – culturally, existentially, morally.
Here are the details from the BBC:
The South Pacific island nation of Samoa is to jump forward in time by one day in order to boost its economy.
Samoa will do this by switching to the west side of the international date line, which it says will make it easier for it to do business with Australia and New Zealand.
At present, Samoa is 21 hours behind Sydney. From 29 December it will be three hours ahead.
The change comes 119 years after Samoa moved in the opposite direction.
Then, it transferred to the east side of the international date line in an effort to aid trade with the US and Europe.
However, Australia and New Zealand have increasingly become Samoa’s biggest trading partners.
Samoan Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi said: “In doing business with New Zealand and Australia, we’re losing out on two working days a week.
“While it’s Friday here, it’s Saturday in New Zealand and when we’re at church Sunday, they’re already conducting business in Sydney and Brisbane.”
Samoa is located approximately halfway between New Zealand and Hawaii and has a population of 180,000 people.
Bridges and Tangents 
It’s remarkable how developments in trade can change everything, even time! It is really quite a funny notion that the Samoans will be losing a day from their calendar. At least, I hope, there won’t be the same upheavals there were when changes were made to the calendars (can someone remind me which?) centuries ago and people rioted because they feared they were actually losing parts of their lives!
Leap frogging over one whole day seems so surreal doesn’t it, Because their sabbath now wont be their sabbath!….but it was only us that named the days anyhow…… wasn’t it. What really is one day, it is one nameless period of time between darkness and light, of an eternal cycle. I often dream of nameless days and nameless time. How liberating. I wonder if we would all age less, if we did not feel time slipping us by.
It is a little like being born at 11.59 and 59 seconds or 12.00 are you the day before, or the day after. Are the clocks/watches all spot on. One of my children by Gods timing would have been a millennium leap baby, but disappointedly hospital convenience and intervention made him the day before. Then there is the new years baby, One year older or one year younger. And then there is the school year August baby, the year below or the year above.
12.00 and human decision making appear to have a little more movement than we maybe realise. Good for Samoa if it will economically help them.