It is usually about this time of year, that our old house is most filled with visitors and this year was no exception.

One set trekked up from Florida and made a welcome Pottstown stop-over on their way to see family in New York.

The others, members of my family, came down from New York to spend Christmas.

And it is at times like this (Christmas and visitors) that I think a lot about George Bailey, the unwilling hero of "It's a Wonderful Life."

A recent piece in The New York Times mocked the movie, arguing that it was not an inspiration but a dark morality tale about abandoning your hopes and dreams and that Bedford Falls would have been better off as Pottersville.

I won't address the merits of this argument (as that is not what this blog is about) other than to say I was not introduced to this movie until I was an adult and went right out and bought a copy. (I confess to regularly misting up when the whole town gets together to bail George out. That's the kind of bailout I can get behind.)

No, what brings George Bailey to mind is the way the nob at the bottom of the banister of his old house keeps coming off in his hand, causing him to curse the old lurking hulk of a house.

While the love/hate relationship I have with my house, built in 1916, is more complicated than this, I certainly understand the impulse, and even more so when we have guests.

Those who wish to shower must be taught how to adjust the hot and cold water to ensure the flow is slow enough so as not to outpace our oil-burning furnace which heats our water all year long through the winter/summer hook-up.

And, when my step-mother is in the house, a woman whose body-fat ratios may well approach negative numbers, we must wrestle with how high to turn the thermostat, this in a year in which we managed to lock-in our oil price when it was the highest in human history, just before it went through the basement floor.

As a result of which, This article in The New York Times caught this George Bailey's eye.

Were we to abandon our old house, impossible to do with our love of the vintage hardwood floors and built-in cabinetry, we might consider the kind of house featured in this article.

It is called a "passive house" and it makes use of free heat.

Much of the heat comes from two free sources, the sun and our own body heat. That, combined with heat generated by the appliances, provides much of the heat necessary in a house hermetically sealed against drafts and heat loss.

(Certainly, a draft-less house would have been welcomed as my friend and I sat in the breakfast nook one night and played cards in sweaters and fleeces, the cards moving every time the wind kicked up.)

The houses are very popular in Germany and their popularity has driven the price differential between "passive houses" and conventional houses down to 5 to 7 percent.

Because those necessary components are not yet commonplace in the U.S., the price differential is significantly higher here.

However, the more popular the idea becomes, the more the price of the two housing types will converge here as well. The idea of a house that requires no oil, gas, coal or electricity to heat will certainly be attractice once the price of oil goes back up, as it inevitably will.

And the environment we all share will benefit as well.

For more information, visit The Passive House Institute Web site.