macos 11, how to prevent icons showing up on desktop?

Greetings,

The desktop has odd icons that I didn't put there. "today", "yesterday".

When I try to delete these items, it seems to remove other files from my desktop.

Luckily I noticed missing files before emptying trash.

I don't care what these items are, I just want to find a way to delete them and don't want them to affect any other files on my computer.

I looked around in Finder Preferences and didn't see anything relevant. searched the web and the forum a little and didn't find any article that seemed relevant.

any suggests appreciated.

thank you!

jeffery

--

MacOS 11.6.2

MBPro from 2020.

my rant...

I was forced to upgrade to macOS 11 a week ago.

unfortunately, it has a plethora of annoyances, a variety of useful and core features removed, and i haven't found a single improvement yet.