Melville, N.Y. — A gold star in the window might mean a son's death in a war. A star on the American flag signifies a state. And a star stuck on a student's work celebrates a job well done.

So what is the meaning of those five-point metal stars that hang on house exteriors, sometimes above the garage or up near the gable?

Turns out that homeowners just like them, plain and simple.

Take Theresa and Richard Gallo of Huntington, who last year put a maroon star over their garage after seeing stars on homes in Massachusetts while visiting a cousin there.

“It just caught my eye ... every house had a star and then we got to her house and she had a star and I said, “I have to get that star',” recalls Theresa Gallo, 51, who works in the compliance department of a Wall Street commodities company. “I just thought it was cute. I figured it would look nice on the house.”

She says she asked her husband's cousin what the star means, but she didn't know and it didn't really matter: “I said, I'm not going home without one.' “

Later, when she talked about the star to Frances Mackay of East Northport, another of her husband's cousins, she learned Mackay had already installed two in her family room, two in her bedroom and a big one in the foyer. Mackay, who'd seen the stars in country-style decor magazines, ordered hers from a catalog.

For her, the stars are both a touch of traditional Americana in her country-flavored family room and a spiritual symbol when flanking an angel image in her bedroom.

And it's a family thing: Her daughter has a gold one over her fireplace in East Northport, where a daughter-in-law has one on the porch wall. Another daughter in Virginia is putting up a big one on a new barn.

“It's very decorative,” Mackay, 68, a part-time secretary, says about the star shape, “and it enhances the area you want to put it in. It covers an area that you don't want to put too many things on, and it gives it a nice impact.”

They've shown up in nurseries and children's rooms, as soft fabric stars and in pink and blue enameled and glittery versions. And they've shown up in colors from black to mustard and maroon, or covered in a starry flag-motif or with a rustic, rusty texture that has proved popular among Ruth Koroghlian's customers at Cow Harbor Fine Gifts in Northport, where the price range is $40 to $55 for stars about 9 inches across all the way up to 24 inches. Some go up to 48 inches for outdoor use.

“They've been popular for two or three years,” she says. “I think it's a countrywide tradition. I've seen them in New England, upstate, across the country.”

The metal stars are actually an outgrowth of an old architectural feature in which metal stars or other geometric shapes, in a range of sizes and styles, were used in a row across the facades of brick buildings to hide the ends of beams used to hold the building and facade together.

The Pennsylvania Dutch stars were painted onto barns, first appearing on circular wooden inserts built into the stone walls of barns from at least the late 1700s, and later painted directly onto barn walls. A popular misconception is that these stars were a good luck symbol. Not so. Rather, they were simply decorative, say local experts such as David Fooks, who runs the annual Kutztown Festival in Kutztown, Pa.

The festival celebrates the culture of those now known as the Pennsylvania Dutch, actually descendants of German immigrants who first settled in what is now Pennsylvania in 1625.

The stars, elaborate colorful designs with up to 18 arms, have “no meaning to them that we've ever been able to find out,” Fooks says, citing research of old interviews by folklorists with elderly itinerant barn star painters early in the 20th Century.

“The only thing they said was that people wanted their barn to be prettier than their neighbor's.”

These stars and other decorations (circular plaques with birds, flowers and hearts for example) are commonly known as hex signs, but, he says, the term hex was probably a mishearing of the German word “sexerei,” meaning six-pointed stars in the dialect there, by travel writer Wallace Nutting, says Fooks.

Nutting, he says, wrote a series of travelogues in the 1920s, including one on “Pennsylvania Beautiful.”

“He flat out made it up how they cut it in half and put it over windows so witches would hit their heads on it,” says Fooks. “He did it just to add color to the travel books he wrote.”

And those colorful decorations with flowers, birds and hearts commonly ascribed to the Amish? Fooks says that a local folk artist and restaurant owner named Johnny Ott created them and made up the meanings to enhance sales to tourists in the 1950s.

As for barn stars on circular wooden plaques, some may be antiques, but others were painted for tourists by a local barn painter named Milton Hill who did barn star demonstrations at early Kutztown festivals, also in the 1950s. His were the first to be painted directly on wooden circles not built into the sides of barns, although barns in Western Pennsylvania started to use them in the 1960s, Fooks says.

Fooks says that in the Middle Ages, a small star by the door represented a free man and landowner in some regions of Germany, and the star figured in colorful decorations on furniture, trunks and textiles.

But the barn star was an indigenous American folk art, he says, adding that he and others were trying to preserve the tradition with an endowment fund to help local farmers with the $1,200 to $1,800 cost of painting new stars on their barns.

As for the metal architectural stars, Matt Lippa of Artisans, a folk art dealer in Alabama who sells with a partner over the Internet at www.folkartisans.com, said that they offer both antique stars, often taken from building demolitions, and new stars that are sometimes sold as old.

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