It's very difficult no matter how you look at it, but the simplest explanation I can find is something like this:
The idea goes back to the 1960s when Professor Higgs and his colleagues were trying to work out why some particles have mass and others don't, as according to their Standard Model all particles should be without mass, like the photon.
This led to the idea of the Higgs field, which interacts with particles and gives them mass. The way one physicist explains this is that the Higgs field acts as a kind of thick syrup, that slows the particles down when they pass through it, which you could say makes them 'heavier' - gives them mass. Some particles seem to be made heavier by the field than others. The Higgs bosun is the particle that makes up the field, like a building block. You can find a fuller explanation here.