Just A Reminder: We’re Well Past Larry David’s Statute of Limitations on Saying ‘Happy New Year’

In the immortal words of Larry David, “Everything doesn’t have to be happy.”

We are officially ten days into 2023, and, as we approach the halfway point of January, it’s high time to remind ourselves that this year is not “new” anymore. Resolutions have been made and broken in the week and a half since the ball dropped. The confetti has been cleared from Times Square, the champagne bottles have all been smashed to dust at the recycling plant and the work week has returned to normal. “Happy New Year” is dead.

Three years ago, the Curb Your Enthusiasm star and creator set a statute of limitations on the seasonal salutation which officially expired one week ago today. “Three days,” David declared of the shelf life for the jovial January greeting – at ten days out, the phrase has positively curdled. With the New Year behind us and Martin Luther King Jr. Day at our doorstep, let’s all agree to bury “Happy New Year” until 2024, just as David intended.

Since David proclaimed the phrase to be short lived back in 2020, it has become a yearly tradition to repost, retweet and re-watch his tangle at the treadmill with a heavily pregnant jogger in the opening episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm Season 10. As is the case anytime David takes a principled stand, the “three days rule” has been much more appreciated by fans of the show than by the characters within it. Each year, as the holiday season continues to encroach every moment from the morning after Halloween through mid-January, the statute of limitations gives us cranky, cantankerous Curb fans that long-awaited reprieve from the well-wishing and warm tidings that have bothered us since the jack-o-lanterns first started melting on the doorsteps. 

Good Tuesday, everyone.