Useless decorations

Cultures are distinguished by their living quarters. Many of those native to the North American continent made tepees and wrapped them thick with animal skins. The skins kept their house insulated from the cold. The early settlers of the Southwest caked mud on the inside of their walls. When dried, it protected the house from the blistering heat.

I worry that the current condition of our living quarters may throw some future anthropologist off. A few modern household decorations, in my opinion, are completely non-functional:

Lots of pillows on the bed. I don't know why, but for some reason my wife thinks our bed looks better when it's overflowing with pillows. If it wasn't for the purple and green pillow-covers, the bed would stand for a cumulus cloud.

The annoying thing is, you have to take them all off when you want to sleep in the thing. But that's the easy part--you can just chuck 'em on the floor. What sucks is placing them back all pack on in the morning in their appropriate order. My wife is trying to figure out a way to number them because I can't ever place them right; all I know is the cylindrical one goes last.

Along the same lines, our bed features a folded blanket at the foot of the bed. A "runner," I believe it's called. According to my wife's rules, it can't be used as a blanket. It's just placed after the bed is made.

So if our house were to sit as is and was unearthed later on, the discovering anthropologist would have to conclude we slept with our necks propped up at 90 degrees and our feet were always freezing. They would also assume our bodies were only about three feet long, since the pillows take up the other three feet of length.

The barn star hung on the house. You don't have to drive around suburbia long before finding a large and rusty star nailed to the front of someone's house. For those out of the loop, it may seem that someone just forgot to take down a 4th of July decoration. Not so, some people think it's a great way to add a rustic accent to their home. People who hang these usually have a kitchen themed after some type of farm animal (e.g., cows, pigs, roosters).

Future anthropologist will quickly realize the barn star served no structural purpose, and therefore conclude it was a religious symbol. They would figure inhabitants worshiped it as they came and went.

Fake fruit. Utilized as a decoration over real fruit because it doesn't draw fruit flies, fake fruit is found in many homes today; a bowl of rubber grapes on the end tables in the living room, a pile of plastic pears on the table in the dining room. No doubt, fake fruit has gotten amazingly realistic over the years. The real thing is mimicked down to the wood-grains in the stems, to the dimples in the peels.

This decoration will really throw anthropologist a curve ball. After much deliberation, you'd have to imagine they'd think the homes with fake fruit were homes of the peasants. They couldn't afford food, but they didn't want visitors to think their cupboards weren't stocked. So they'd form fake fruit and set it out all around the house.

Whatever the case, as a man I'd hope future anthropologist would realize we didn't adorn our homes with non-functional decor because we were a regressing society. We did it because we realized the best way to progress as a culture was by keeping the wife happy.

Photo 1: http://www.fdlhome.com/index.asp?PageAction=COMPANY
Photo 2: http://www.picanswers.com/questions/530-barn-stars-made-in-the-united-states-
Photo 3: http://www.seefred.com/cgi-bin/shop.pl/page=newfruit.htm