January 8 is the last day for Cambridge residents to put their Christmas trees out for curbside pickup. The trees collected are chipped and used as mulch in parks around town. For more information, see the city’s announcement.

In my last post I considered the changes I made in 2009; now it’s time to think about the things I want to do in 2010. This is more brainstorming than resolution-making. With that in mind, here are some things I might write about here this year.

I’m not a big fan of New Year’s resolutions, but the week that I have off between Christmas and New Year’s is a great time to de-stress from the holidays and reboot my normal life. With that in mind, I’m going to take stock of the efforts I’ve made to live more sustainably this year and think of things I might want to focus on next year. It’s a lot of stuff, so I’ll break it out over a couple posts. First up: this year’s progress.

We had the season’s first real snowstorm this weekend, and we weren’t really prepared for it. I didn’t even know where our shovel was! We also didn’t have any salt for the front steps, so I took this opportunity to find out if we could get something that had less of an impact on the environment.

For people who use real Christmas trees, the question comes up each year—should they switch to artificial? Our general rule is that reusable is better than disposable, but in this case, it’s not that simple.