You couldn’t ASCII for a better gift

While millions of people around the world have been busy putting up holiday decorations and wrapping presents, a handful of Twitter artists have been creating small pieces of holiday art that you can send in a second.

Using ASCII characters, a 48-year-old encoding scheme that is built into all modern computer operating systems, artists like Matthew Haggett (@tw1tt3rart) and Gregory Wadsworth (@aggregart) have put together holiday tweets featuring Santa Claus, reindeer and Christmas trees.

Twitter art is an offshoot of older ASCII art, a mainstay of online communities since the days of bulletin-board systems—but adapted to Twitter’s compact format.

Image by Matthew Haggett