Good morning John,

It’s Saturday-what on earth am I doing here on Saturday.I’m throwing a wrench in the whole thing,I made a video yesterday about octopuses and now I’m back? This isn’t how it works except of course it is because John I’m here to tell you that I,your brother-Hank green,love you.Thanks for being a good brother because it is Esther day.

It is in fact,the 10th Esther day if you can believe that. John,this is what you looked like when you were announcing the very 1st Esther day,you were so young and beautiful and that hair-you had to crop,you had to go down here,your eyes keep them down here so the hair.

John I’ve love you,I’ve always loved you-I’ve not always loved your hair. I also love that for the last ten years we’ve taken a day of the year at the request of Esther Earl-a Nerdfighter,an awesome person to tell the people that that we love that we love them:not our internet faves,not our crushes but our friends and family who we want to always be there for and who probably know that we love them and maybe we just assume that they know but that doesn’t mean that they don’t wanna hear it and that it isn’t actually good to say it out loud sometimes. It’s just really important and like after 10 years of doing it I realise how important it is.

I think sometimes that like tradition can get a bad rap because of course,tradition comes from the old times and the old times were bad,like mountains of Cholera and irrational hatred bad and yeah because of that,some traditions that we he hold onto and we’ve sort of refused to modify because we’re sort of like tied to the idea of the tradition itself can be counter to our values and maybe I'm just getting old here,but I think that the existence of tradition is very good;like having a time every year to say thanks to your mom,even if it was created by a greeting card company,that’s a good tradition. There’ve been times in my life when I’ve kind of coupled those two things together,like the idea of a particular exercise of a tradition and the existence of tradition like repeatedly doing things for a reason that that you believe in and I just sorta thrown them both out. Like I rebelled against the idea of tradition when I should of been rebelling against certain ways of experiencing certain traditions.

Valentine’s day day for me personally has always sort of seemed a blah thing:the way that people do it but I do like there being an opportunity for me to like write a card to Katherine telling her that I love her and why and why she’s so great but kind of because we don’t like the traditional way of celebrating that tradition we kinda don’t at all whereas maybe we should,maybe we should find our own way of doing it. Let’s get a babysitter to just stay downstairs while we watch all of the Colin Firth Pride and Prejudice for the 85th time.

What Esther did when requesting that we celebrate her birthday by celebrating familial love is genius because somehow there wasn’t a day for that.That tradition didn’t exist but it like needed to , maybe in the past it didn’t need to,maybe it did but it like does because things are more true when we say them out loud and definitely more true when we hear them.

John,I appreciate you so much,you’re a good person and a hard worker and a great dad. I love you and I’m so glad that you’re part of my life.I love working with you and I love working to make our relationship strong and I would literally never say any of that if there wasn’t a tradition-right but now,10 years in,it is a tradition to me and it’s normal for me. So,to the people who aren’t John ,whether it’s your 1st of your 10th-take some time ,send a text or an email or a phone call or a gosh darn letter. Tell those people who you think probably know it already that you love them because even if they know,they’re gonna love hearing it.

John,I’ll see you on Tuesday