For decades, lavish holiday window displays at department stores have been one of the first signs of the season. But have you ever wondered how the designers behind the windows create those enchanting arrangements? Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at everything that goes into making the holiday windows so magical at this time of year—from the best way to arrange lights to the pre-season all-nighters.

1. EVERY HOLIDAY WINDOW HAS A PURPOSE.

The holiday windows are supposed to make you feel something, says Jacques Rosas, New York-based artist, founder, and CEO of Jacques Rosas, which does holiday window installations in stores such as Godiva, Elizabeth Arden, and Bed, Bath & Beyond. Whenever Rosas is working on a window, he asks about the personality of the store, what they’re imagining, favorite decorations, traditions, and more—all starting with what they sell. “I try to pull settings that have nostalgia for them,” Rosas says. “I think the magical part is the nostalgia.” He loves the feel of an old-fashioned Christmas—last year, he decked out one store window with handmade stockings, old ornaments, and a real train.

2. YOU WON’T SEE MANY CHRISTMAS TREES IN THE STORE WINDOWS.

 
At least not any real Christmas trees, Rosas says. Usually, the windows are hot, dry places, so any live trees would dry out and die. They could also catch fire, so a lot of the newer buildings won’t use them even if they could create the right environmental conditions. “We tend to use a lot of fake stuff,” Rosas says.

3. YOU ALSO WON’T SEE ANY PRODUCTS.

While stores’ windows throughout the year are supposed to sell products, this time of year is all about the entertainment, says David Spaeth, CEO of Spaeth Design, which does holiday windows for Lord & Taylor, Saks Fifth Avenue, Bloomingdale’s, Tiffany & Co. and Bergdorf Goodman. Sure, you may see a product or two in some of the windows (it’s not a hard-and-fast rule), but this is the time to seduce customers with gorgeous snowflakes or pretty (fake) trees instead of fantastic outfits.

4. BUT YOU WILL SEE LIGHTS.

Lights are what draws customers to the windows, and they can really make the displays pop. But you’d be surprised at how few lights will make a big splash, Rosas says. “There’s not a lot of lights—that’s a big mistake,” he says. “If you do too many, the reflection will play tricks on the viewer, and you won’t actually be able to see anything but lights.” Instead, he uses a few perfectly placed lights that bounce off each other. Rosas also tends to use plenty of wood composite, fiberglass, bark, paper, and plastic to create his scenes. But don’t be surprised to spot other wacky items in holiday store windows, like Lite-Brite (yes, the retro toy), coffee stirrers, and even taxidermy. Anything goes when it comes to creating the perfect holiday window.

5. THEY PLAN AHEAD.

When the holidays start dying down, these designers are just getting started on the following year, says Michael Bednark, owner of Bednark Studio, a Brooklyn-based fabrication studio that is responsible for some of the Macy’s holiday windows throughout the country. Design talks start in January, and by March, the ideas are set. It takes two more months to figure out rendering, and the summer months are for fabrication (building the physical elements). Installation starts even before Halloween—by about mid-October, Bednark says.

6. THEY HAVE WORKING HABITS COMPARABLE TO VAMPIRES.

Ever wonder how holiday windows pop up like magic? That’s because the artists work through the night to put them up so that they’ll appear in the morning. Installation for the simpler windows usually takes six to eight hours, Rosas says. “We have to be like wizards,” he explains.

7. THE MORE INTENSIVE WINDOWS TAKE WEEKS TO INSTALL.

 
A regular window display is an overnight job, but the team working on the Macy’s windows pre-builds them inside the shop. There’s a fake window inside every single Macy’s store, filled with the entire holiday window display. “We pre-build inside the shop so we can make sure that everything fits,” Bednark says. The pre-build takes about four weeks. If it’s a go, it’s moved into the regular window, which takes three weeks.

8. TO MAKE IT LOOK PERFECT, THE ARTISTS TOUCH EVERY LIGHT.

The reason store windows look amazing while your holiday display looks just passable is because these designers really pay attention to the details. “When you decorate a tree, or you’re doing your lights and everything, the secret to really nice displays is to touch and adjust each branch, each light, and position everything as if everything was its own individual thing,” Rosas says. “That’s the secret to styling.”

9. WHEN THE SEASON IS OVER, THE DISPLAYS ARE USUALLY TOSSED.

 
Some stores will re-use the decorations in-house, but many will toss them because the décor is so unique. Basically, they don’t want to wear the same outfit two days in a row, Spaeth explains.

10. THE HOLIDAYS AREN’T THEIR ONLY BUSY SEASON.

We’re obsessed with holiday store windows, and they’re great for business. But these artists are busy year-round, Rosas says. In addition to doing store window displays for every season, they also decorate show rooms, do trade show displays, and even create sets for TV shows and product launches. In Rosas’ studio, they have two 7500-square-foot spaces, and they use these for creating fake store windows or for marketing experiences. For example, a yogurt company may hire Rosas to use that studio to build an entire yogurt set as a backdrop for a yogurt product launch. The yogurt company would then invite members of the media to the room, where they’d take pictures and do interviews. “We try to inspire people to write about [the company] there,” Rosas says.

11. IF YOU WANT TO REPLICATE THE LOOK, GET OUT YOUR CHECKBOOK.

 
To hire a professional display artist to do your holiday windows, expect to pay anywhere from $40,000 to $100,000 per window, depending on the number of details and amount of work it will take, Bednark says. In other words, making this kind of magic doesn’t come cheap.

Saying no to requests you don’t want to follow through on or don’t have time to accomplish is a difficult skill to master. Especially at the office, many people feel compelled to be a “yes man.” But as a video from SUCCESS magazine’s Mel Robbins recently highlighted, there’s a pretty easy way to keep yourself from saying yes when what you really need to say is no.

The key lies in saying “I don’t” instead of “I can’t.” In one of several tests included in a study [PDF] by Boston College and Houston University first released several years ago, researchers found that volunteers who said “I don’t skip exercise” instead of “I can’t skip exercise” worked out more often.

Regardless of whether you’re talking to yourself or another person, “can’t” suggests that you might want to do something, but aren’t able to; Robbins gives the example of saying “I can’t eat cake for lunch.” The implication is that in another set of circumstances, you could. But when you say “I don’t” (“I don’t eat cake for lunch”), there’s no room for debate. It’s a hard-and-fast rule that you set for yourself.

The researchers write that “using the word ‘don’t’ serves as a self-affirmation of one’s personal willpower and control in the relevant self-regulatory goal pursuit, leading to a favorable influence on feelings of empowerment, as well as on actual behavior. On the other hand, saying ‘I can’t do X’ connotes an external focus on impediments.”

See more in the video below:

[h/t SUCCESS]

Just when you thought nature couldn’t get any more adorable, there’s this. Scientists have discovered that teensy shrimp, jellies, and other sea creatures act as pollinators for underwater plants. They described the sea bees’ activity in the journal Nature Communications.

The sea grass Thalassia testudinum, also known as turtle grass, grows in dense meadows in the shallows of the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico. The grass puts out little white and pale pink flowers, some (male flowers) giving off pollen and others (female flowers) accepting it. Scientists have long believed that turtle grass pollinates itself by simply releasing its pollen into the water, which washes it into receptive female flowers.

Those scientists were correct. But the grass also seems to make use of its little visitors, as researchers learned when they trained video cameras on a flowering meadow. They discovered that the meadow was a bustling place frequented by dozens of different species [PDF], from shrimp and crabs to jellies, isopods, and worms.

Analysis of the recordings also revealed an interesting trend: male flowers full of pollen were far more popular with crustacean visitors than those without. The researchers watched as the tiny animals fed from the male flowers and swam away, grains of pollen still stuck to their bodies. The situation looked awfully familiar. Was it possible that the animals serve the same role underwater as bees do on land?

To find out, the researchers carefully collected flowering turtle grass and a sampling of its animal visitors, then brought them all into the lab. They set up a series of trays, each containing a single pollen-rich male and a single female flower, then added the trays to small aquaria teeming with their regular customers. They also ran a second experiment, in which the two flowers were buffeted by different types and strengths of current.

The researchers’ hypothesis was spot-on: The little animals were indeed ferrying grains of pollen from male to female flowers, allowing the flowers to get it on even in the absence of strong currents.

Kelly Darnell of The Water Institute of the Gulf was unaffiliated with the study, but told New Scientist she was excited with its findings.

“That pollination by animals can occur adds an entirely new level of complexity to the system,” she said, “and describes a very interesting plant-animal interaction that hasn’t really fully been described before.”

Turtle grass can also reproduce asexually, so pollination via shrimp likely represents a pretty small portion of its sex (or sexless) life. But the fact that it happens at all is delightful enough for us.

Recognizing a fellow human’s face is about more than just identifying a nose or mouth. It’s believed we use something called configural recognition to process the entire facial structure altogether, which is why there’s often a little bit of a lag time when we see a face upside-down (humans have an easier time recognizing other objects, like cars or houses, that have been flipped).

Researchers now believe chimpanzees have something similar to configural recognition. Only they use it to recognize each other’s butts.

In a paper published in the journal PLOS One, researchers from the Netherlands and Japan observed chimps as they examined photographs of primate buttocks and played a variation on the “match” game, coupling two identical butts together on a touch screen. They appeared slower to recognize posteriors when the images were rotated 180 degrees, indicating they rely on the same configural clues humans do. The researchers also carried out experiments on humans, who (as expected) took a longer time to process images of human faces flipped upside-down, but whose reaction time didn’t change significantly when they were presented with upside-down images of human behinds.

It’s believed chimps have evolved to focus on butts due to their proximity to them while moving in groups. Walking on four legs, they’re often (literally) faced with a rump ahead of them. Since ovulating females usually have red, swollen rear ends, male chimps benefit from being able to identify them. What’s more, chimps can typically separate an ovulating non-relative from a relative, preventing inbreeding.

The paper concludes, “The findings suggest an evolutionary shift in socio-sexual signalling function from behinds to faces, two hairless, symmetrical and attractive body parts, which might have attuned the human brain to process faces, and the human face to become more behind-like.”

[h/t Discover]

While you’re probably familiar with pies, croissants, cream puffs, and tarts, there are plenty of other tantalizing pastries to discover. Using a simple base of flour, butter, sugar, eggs, and shortening, pastry chefs can create a cornucopia of delicious desserts. If you’re looking to expand your pastry horizons, consider these 12 delectable pastries from around the world.

1. FRANZBRÖTCHEN // GERMANY

Most popular in Hamburg and other parts of northern Germany, Franzbrötchen are croissant-like spiral pastries made with butter and cinnamon. Germans usually eat Franzbrötchen at breakfast with their morning coffee, and they sometimes add raisins to them.

2. GULAB JAMUN // INDIA

We can thank India for gulab jamun, a glorious pastry that combines balls of fried dough with sweet syrup. Shaped like doughnut holes, the balls of dough are usually made with milk powder or corn flour and then fried in ghee. Gulab jamun packs a powerful dose of sugar, but cardamom, rose water, and saffron add more subtle notes to the pastry.

3. PASTELITOS // CUBA

Cubans and Cuban-Americans in Miami know pastelitos well. Similar to jelly doughnuts, the pastries are typically made with flaky filo dough and contain a filling of guava and cheese. Some pastelitos have more unusual sweet and savory fillings, such as pineapple, coconut, ham, and crab.

4. BAKLAVA // TURKEY

A popular Middle Eastern dessert, baklava consists of layers of chopped pistachios and sweetened filo dough. The pastries may also include chopped walnuts or pecans as well as plenty of honey, butter, and sugar. For an authentic Turkish experience, savor baklava after a meal while sipping tea.

5. CANNOLI // ITALY

Cannoli got its start over 1000 years ago in Palermo, the capital of Sicily. Today, Italians still enjoy biting into the cannoli’s shell of fried dough to taste the creamy, sweetened ricotta filling. And thanks to Italian-Americans making and selling cannoli, most of us are familiar with the decadent Italian pastry.

6. SUFGANIYOT // ISRAEL

Sufganiyot are Israel’s answer to jelly doughnuts. The balls of deep-fried dough are filled with jelly and topped with powdered sugar. The Jewish recipe is popular around the world now, especially each December when they are served during Hanukkah.

7. LINZER TORTE // AUSTRIA

The beautiful latticework on the top of Linzer tortes makes them instantly recognizable. Said to date to the mid-1600s, people in Linz, Austria began making these tortes, layering pastry dough with currant preserves. Today, the torte usually contains a filling of berry preserves, and the pastry dough is made with butter and ground nuts.

8. KOLOMPEH // IRAN

Native to Kerman, Iran, kolompeh are cookie-sized pies made with minced dates, walnuts, cardamom, saffron, and sesame. Before baking the pastries, Iranians stamp them with kolompeh stamps, creating beautiful, intricate designs on the top of the pastries.

9. BIRNBROT // SWITZERLAND

Pear lovers will enjoy Birnbrot, a pear-centric Swiss pastry that incorporates dried fruits, spices, and nuts. The sweet bread is made from yeast dough and filled with everything from dried pears, dried apples or figs, walnuts, raisins, cinnamon, clove, and coriander.

10. MOONCAKE // CHINA

Every fall, Chinese people celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival by gathering to view the full moon and giving mooncakes to their friends and family, symbolizing completeness and unity. The pastries are round (like the moon), sweet, and filled with a paste made of lotus seeds, red beans, or dates. Some Cantonese mooncakes also contain a salted duck egg yolk inside.

11. CROQUEMBOUCHE // FRANCE

If you’re at a wedding or special event in France and spot a tower of desserts, you’re probably looking at a croquembouche. This triangle-shaped tower consists of carefully stacked profiteroles (a.k.a. cream puffs) decorated with strands of caramelized sugar. It’s fancy, elegant, and downright delectable.

12. PINEAPPLE BUN // HONG KONG

Pineapple buns—also called Bolo Bao—are soft, sweet, chewy, and slightly crunchy on top. They don’t actually have any pineapple in them; rather, the pastry’s crust has a grid pattern that resembles a pineapple. If you’re not in Hong Kong, you can probably find pineapple buns in Chinese bakeries.