Some called it “the Internet’s takeover of the English language” when GIF became Oxford American Dictionary’s Word of the Year in November 2012.

In the past 12 months the GIF, a 25-year-old low-tech invention – a GIF is an image file made of several related pictures (the branch image below is made of 23 pictures) layered in an endless loop – has kept proving itself as a thing of magic. Be it hearts, fireworks or winter snow, GIFS inspire the child in us.

You can copy any of the GIFs below into your own emails. Keep going and you’ll find instructions.

To copy a GIF, just right-click with your mouse over the image and select “save image.” Then open a new email form, write your message, and add your image as an attachment (click here to learn how to attach files to an email). In Gmail, you can add the image to the body of the email like this. And here’s how to do it on iPad.

Happy holidays!