Every animation as MP4 and GIF, looping, free for personal and commercial use.
A quiet village under slowly falling snow, warm light in the windows and stars over the hills. The greeting pops in once and then holds.
Free for personal and commercial use. No account, no attribution required.
A decorated tree by the fireplace with twinkling lights and soft bokeh. Warm and calm, made for greetings and newsletters.
Free for personal and commercial use. No account, no attribution required.
Coloured string lights blink above a snowy Christmas market at night. No text, so it works as a background for your own message.
Free for personal and commercial use. No account, no attribution required.
Gold lettering on deep green with drifting sparkles: one card for Christmas and New Year at once.
Free for personal and commercial use. No account, no attribution required.
A painted snow globe on a wooden table, with snow drifting inside the glass over a tiny village.
Free for personal and commercial use. No account, no attribution required.
Santa's sleigh and reindeer cross the full moon over a snowy field. The classic silhouette, looping cleanly.
Free for personal and commercial use. No account, no attribution required.
Three wrapped presents bounce in turn while confetti falls on festive red. Cheerful and short.
Free for personal and commercial use. No account, no attribution required.
Three candles with flickering flames on a warm dark ground. Quiet, for a calmer holiday greeting.
Free for personal and commercial use. No account, no attribution required.
A twinkling star above snowy firs announces that Christmas is coming. Works for the whole of Advent.
Free for personal and commercial use. No account, no attribution required.
Snow falls through a pine forest at dusk under a violet sky. Pure atmosphere without text.
Free for personal and commercial use. No account, no attribution required.
On the last Friday before the holidays, the same small jobs land on a lot of desks. The newsletter needs a festive header, the sales deck wants a moving opening slide, and the family chat is waiting for something better than a plain “merry christmas”. One Christmas GIF or video loop can cover all three, as long as each place gets the right file.
The ten Christmas animations above are free to download as MP4 and as GIF, and each scene has a preview image. The MP4 is an H.264 video, 600×600 or 800×450 pixels, four to six seconds long, looping without a visible cut and usually under 2 MB. The GIF version is 400 pixels on its long edge, runs at 8 frames per second with 96 colors and weighs between about 0.6 and 4.3 MB. You don’t need an account, a sign-up or an API key.
The collection includes a snowy village at night, a string of lights on a Christmas tree, a snow globe, candles, wrapped gifts, Santa passing in front of the moon, a quiet winter forest and lights strung over rooftops. Six scenes carry a greeting in English or German: the snowy village, the tree lights, the golden greeting, the gifts, the candles and “Christmas is coming”.
Here are ten places where a short xmas loop does useful work. Explore them, then pick the file type that fits each one.
A GIF in your signature is the one place where the old image type wins outright. Mail programs show images but rarely play video. Insert the 400-pixel file, then scale it to about 150 to 200 pixels wide so it does not dwarf your name. Older desktop versions of Outlook show only the first frame; Apple Mail, Gmail and Thunderbird play the animation.
Mailchimp, Brevo and similar tools accept animated images but not video, so the GIF goes at the top, above the rest of the content. Many readers block images until the recipient clicks “show images”. Write the alt text like a headline, for example “Snowy village at night, merry Christmas from the whole team”.
Instagram does not take GIF files. Upload the MP4 instead. The 600×600 square sits well in the feed, and the 800×450 clip works as a background layer in a story, with your own text on top. Because the loop is seamless, it can repeat in a reel and nobody spots the seam. TikTok and YouTube Shorts behave the same way.
In a messenger, send the GIF. WhatsApp plays it inline, and recipients can forward it to friends with one tap. A saved file will not show up in the GIF keyboard of your phone, so on Android and iPhone you attach it like a photo from the gallery. If you prefer something calmer than a meme, the candles or Santa in front of the moon make a gentle greeting for the holiday.
On your own pages, skip the GIF: a 4 MB image slows the first load. Embed the MP4 with the video element and the attributes autoplay, muted, loop and playsinline. According to MDN’s reference for the HTML video element, modern browsers block autoplay for video with an audible track, and a muted loop avoids that block. You get a fraction of the file size and none of the color banding.
PowerPoint takes both: Insert > Pictures for the GIF, Insert > Video for the MP4. The GIF only moves during the slide show, which confuses people every December. In Google Slides, put the MP4 in Google Drive first and insert it from there. On a projector the video looks sharper than the GIF.
Streamers and video editors can use the dark scenes as overlays. Place the MP4 on a layer above your camera in OBS or your editing program and set the blend mode to “Screen” or “Add”. The black background drops out, and only the lights or flakes stay over your picture. For falling flakes without a village, the snow animations include a loop on a dark background made for this.
During the winter months, a display in a shop window needs a loop that runs for hours without a visible restart. The 800×450 MP4 fills a 16:9 screen when the player scales it, and next to the real decorations and ornaments a five-second xmas file looks like one continuous scene. Most signage players and smart TVs read MP4 from a USB stick; support for animated images is patchy there.
Instead of a printed card, send a short clip. Open the MP4 in a phone video editor, add a line with the names of the recipients so they become the star of the card, and export. To combine a few photos from the past twelve months with a festive loop, the slideshow maker does it without installing anything and exports MP4, WebM or GIF.
Zoom plays an MP4 as a virtual background on most desktop installs. Microsoft Teams takes still images, so use the preview image there. If you want a calm background, pick a scene with little movement in the center, such as the forest or the lights over the village, so your face stays easy to see.
| Channel | File | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Email signature, newsletter | GIF | Mail programs show images, not video |
| WhatsApp, Slack, Signal | GIF | Plays inline, easy to forward |
| Instagram, TikTok, Shorts | MP4 | These apps convert GIFs to video anyway |
| Landing page | MP4 | Smaller, sharper, faster to load |
| PowerPoint | GIF or MP4 | Both work; MP4 looks sharper |
| Google Slides | MP4 via Drive | Slides plays video reliably |
| OBS, video editing | MP4 | Blend mode “Screen” for overlays |
| Signage, smart TV | MP4 | Wider player support |
GIF stores every frame as a full picture with at most 256 colors; we use 96. The format dates from 1987, gained animation with GIF89a in 1989 and knows nothing about motion. H.264 compression is based on what changes between frames, so a quiet village with drifting flakes compresses very well. That is why a 4 MB GIF and a 1.5 MB MP4 can show the same scene, with the video running smoother.
Yes. Our license terms are short: private and commercial use is allowed on websites, social media, presentations, videos, streams and newsletters, without credit. Only reselling the files themselves is not allowed. GIF search platforms work differently; their terms of service usually cover sharing inside their apps, and many clips are taken from films or shows. Read those terms of service before you put such a clip in a campaign.
No. There is no account and no email form, so you do not hand over personal data to get a file. The privacy policy of this site explains what the server itself records. If you add an animation to your own newsletter, your own privacy policy applies as always.
The six text scenes here exist in two language versions, English and German. For anything else, open the MP4 in a video editor or in PowerPoint and place your words on top. To start from scratch with your own photos and wording, the GIF maker lets you create a looping animation in the browser in a few minutes. Have a calm Christmas Eve, and enjoy the holidays.
We made every animation in this gallery ourselves. You may use them for free, privately and commercially: on websites, social media, presentations, videos, streams and newsletters. No attribution is required. The only thing not allowed is reselling the files themselves or offering them as your own collection.
