So I was wondering how long the years for Esther's shop were going to be up, and if there was going to be a year expiring like say in 2017 will 2012 expire, or will they all just stay forever?

A specific year had been opened for ~3 years before. They introduced a new shop layout (last year or the one before I think) for the event shops with a code that loads each years items when the desired shop tab is selected. Before the shop page would load all items of every year and it would really slow down the site. That's why older years were removed after a while.

So i think there are good chances that the older years will stay available almost forever :)

Oh ok, thank you for that info, and I hope so to. Would be very nice as there are things I want to get but not enough coins. lol