Hi David, thanks for getting in touch!
Do you happen to have a pre-sales question for us, or are you looking for technical support? If you’re looking for support and have a premium license for one of our plugins, we’d be happy to help you out in our Events Calendar PRO forum. If you don’t have a license, you’re totally welcome to post to the WordPress.org forum, which we use for general plugin support for The Events Calendar.
That said, the calendar does consider an event “past” once it has started, so it will move out of the Upcoming Events list.
The date format does change when the event takes place in a future year. You can change those settings in Events > Settings > Display under the Date Format section.
Please let me know if you have any questions about the features of our premium plugins and I’d be happy to help. 🙂
Cheers and happy new year!
Geoff