system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
What exactly about the Higgs Boson or the Higgs field gives matter mass?
gpt
The Higgs field, because of something called the Higgs mechanism, has by default, in vacuum / zero temperature / however you want to call it, a large nonzero value, called a VEV (vacuum expectation value), constant everywhere in space and time. 

Instead, generally fields take a zero value when you take away all energy from them (they have zero VEV).

The Higgs field can oscillate around this VEV (just like normal fields can oscillate around 0). There are 4 modes of oscillation, but 3 cannot really be observed because of reasons we shouldn't go into now, and the 4th is the Higgs boson. The Higgs boson is very massive because it takes a lot of energy to make that mode oscillate. To give a quantum of energy to the Higgs field in that oscillation mode - namely, to create a Higgs boson, you need a lot of energy. So there actually isn't a lot of Higgses around in the Universe and it took the LHC to make a few. So the Higgs boson is **not** important for this.

Now, the fermions of the standard model are coupled to the Higgs field, i.e. they interact with it. Since the Higgs field is written as the VEV + oscillations (Higgs boson), and the second part is nonexistent unless you have the LHC, then the fermions essentially interact with the VEV. The VEV is constant and so this is a constant interaction of these particles with this background, which manifests as a mass.

The fermions all interact with the same VEV but the strength of the interaction is different between them. For example the top quark has the strongest interaction with the Higgs field, and so gets a large mass. The other fermions have progressively weaker and weaker couplings with the Higgs field and so smaller masses.