I hate fake trees, but my wife loves them because she thinks they're easier to decorate, and less messy. This is one battle that I've managed to win, by god.
Fake. When I was a kid my parents would buy a real one every year. What a pain in the ass that was. Eventually we did end up with a fake tree and I'm not ever going back(unless kiddos are really set on it). I don't know why everyone is so attatched to real trees. It's just a decoration either way.
I like how the house smell with a real tree, but we have fake, the price is lower, and I hate throwing to the trash a tree, I dont like seeing all those trees in the garbage.
I prefer real, and while I once thought that cutting trees was an ironic stamp of capitalism and consumerism through the symbolic act of some semblance of deforestation, I have aged since those days and realized that most tree farms are created for this purpose, and that they are inclined to replace what they cut, and account for a vast many trees grown, so that's probably a good thing. that said, some years, another $80 or so bucks for a tree just isn't in the cards, so I have a fake backup when I think things might get tight. This year? I inherited a nice fake one from a relative who passed, so this fake one has more meaning than my usual fake one, and is nicer. I miss the smell, though, of the real ones.