YIPPEE! Pardon my glee, but for the first time in over a decade, I made it to Thanksgiving without turning on the heat in the house.

Okay, I exaggerate. I turned it on Tuesday, two days before Thanksgiving.

Home ownership burdens you with a lot of responsibilities. But it also gives you the chance to engage in stupid little games, such as seeing how long you can hold Old Man Winter at bay by not turning on the furnace.

I play this game because hot, stuffy rooms make me uncomfortable. And I play it because I am cheap. When the furnace does snap on and the gas meter starts clicking, I have visions of dollar bills sailing out of the window.

For the past two decades, my goal has been to wait until Thanksgiving to fire up the furnace in our Baltimore home. This year, thanks to having a row house with only two exposed walls, and thanks to some good luck, I made it to Thanksgiving week. From time to time my chances of getting through the early autumn without coughing up a nickel for heat looked shaky. There were days when temperatures dipped into the 40s, and some family members muttered the "freezing" word. But then a "southwesterly flow" would arrive in town and push temperatures back into the 60s. Other times strong sunlight would pour through the house's big windows, creating what I like to call "passive solar sites." Other members of the household refer to them as "the only warm spots in the house."

Turning on the heat, and paying big utility bills, is, I contend, the easy way to battle Old Man Winter. The hard work is capturing and preserving all the warmth that Nature has given us. I preach this sermon to my family every fall. I also recite three keys to living a furnace-free lifestyle:

Open the shutters and shades during the day to let the sunlight in to heat up the plaster walls.

Snap the shutters and shades closed at sundown to keep the residual heat in the house.

Shut the door! Shut the door! Shut the door!

From time to time, family members, such as our 17-year-old son, complain to me about being "chilly." I offer several paternal responses. Mainly I tell him to put on some clothes. Wearing shorts and a T-shirt is, I remind him, appropriate dress for August, not November.

I also tell him that if he's a little chilly, he should put on a sweater made in America, where lightweight sweaters are popular. If he feels "cold," I say, he should put on one of the heavy sweaters we bought in Ireland, where sweaters are made with the wool from two or three sheep. If you wear one of these Irish sweaters anywhere other than in the middle of a North Sea gale, you soon will be sweating like a pig.

The teen-ager, like other family members, shrugs when he hears this spiel. He knows that despite my fantasy of going through an entire winter without paying a big utility bill, I will eventually succumb to the comforts of central heating.

And so Tuesday, as the temperature dropped and weather forecasters talked about snow, I surrendered.

I walked over to the thermostat and moved the dial from the frugal setting of 40 degrees to a profligate setting of 68. The furnace sprang to life. Its gas jets glowed as they heated water. The pump whirred as it sent the hot water hurtling to the long-dormant, stone-cold radiators around the house. Pipes clanked and floorboards creaked as they offered up their version of the "Hallelujah Chorus."

While I am gloating about this exceptionally late start to the heating season, I am also a little worried. The last time I held out this long was in 1989. Then, the winter that followed was a mean one, with a bitter December and serious snowfall in March. I may have won this early skirmish , but the war with winter could just be heating up.