• NPR, All Things Considered , Tuesday, November 25, 2008 11 AM

When things are bad, we can at least make them look good, right?

NPR's Andrea Seabrook caught up with Macy's window designer Paul Olszewski as he was putting the finishing touches on this year's animated holiday window display at the 34th Street flagship store in Manhattan. The theme of the season is "Believe." Believe in what?

"I wanted to take all the simple things that surround us during the holidays and make you believe that so much more goes into them, that so much magic goes into them," Olszewski says. So, for instance?

Well, take the "Emotion Detector," a dial that's collecting "fondness" and "charm tonic" from the world and mixing it with ingredients that passersby add by touching the window -- a soupcon of love, a dash of care, a sprinkle of hope. It all "gets rolled up into a colorful ball and sent out into the world," Seabrook reports, but she does not neglect to point out that Olszewski's real job is, of course,to make reluctant shoppers spend.

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