The holidays are upon us and it looks like some folks are getting into the spirit of all things bright and twinkly by adding some of their own twinkle to their emails.

November 19 - AT&T recently sent me an email with a row of phones they were hawking as part of a holiday promotion. Low and behold, an animated .gif for all to see. Twinkle. Suddenly, visions of dancing cell phones in my head.

November 20 - Apple sends me an email announcing their ‘Black Friday’ sale event. For email clients like Outlook that don’t support animated .gifs, the email looked like this. However, in web mail clients like gmail, the animated .gif worked just fine and twinkled like this. (Santa - send me my iPhone)

November 23 - REI sends me this email that speaks to both skiers and snowboarders equally (because really, you’re either one or the other). Double twinkle.

So what does this mean? I’m not sure and would love some feedback on whether the animated .gif is a seasonal special like Starbucks Christmas Blend (my fave) or a new email trend.

If we’re honest about human nature, we gravitate towards ‘blingy’ and ‘blinky’ things, and my eye automatically went after the twinkly things in these emails.