Dilemma

We're in a bit of a dilemma here at the little house in the swamp.  We've always had a real Christmas tree.  Some years we've gone and cut our own, and some years bought it at a lot, but always a real one.

Our Usual Tree

This year we're kicking around the idea of an artificial one.  We've always bought a real one because we love the look and smell of it.  But it's been years since the trees have had any smell that you could detect more than a foot or two away.  That's why we decided to stop buying our tree at a lot and go to a Christmas tree farm and cut one.  Again, though, the smell didn't last, and one year a fresh tree we'd cut began losing its needles at an alarming rate and was almost bald by Christmas, making turning the lights on a bit dangerous.
You might think from this that we weren't keeping our tree in water, but we do, checking the water level every day.  And our house is never overheated (she said wearing 2 sweaters to keep warm) so that wasn't  the problem either.
Since moving here to Georgia we've been getting our tree from a local lot, buying what's called a Fraser Fir.  They're beautiful trees, very straight, thick and lose very few of their needles.  Mac puts them in the lagoon after Christmas to provide fish habitat.
But they have very little smell, and a couple of times we've had trouble with the tree holder leaking and causing a floorboard to warp.  We've been lucky that it didn't warp badly and when dry it straightened out.
I don't want to buy a live tree, there's really no room in our yard for more trees.  I spend the spring pulling out pine trees that have seeded themselves all over the place.  And I don't want any more cedar, we put in 2 when we first moved here and they're huge now.  Those are the 2 fir trees that grow best here.
I love a big tree and our ceiling is very high so often our tree is between 7 and 8 feet high.  I'd get bigger but, our car is small and we have to carry the tree up stairs into the house.  So that limits me.
This year we thought we'd look into artificial trees.  It would save our car that always has to haul my mammoth one home, it would save our backs from having to haul it up the stairs and it would save our wood floors.
What it would not save is my piggy bank.  The reasonably priced ones don't look real and they're tall and skinny.  I like a really full tree.  The ones I'd consider have been in the $200-$500 range.  Ouch!!!!  I know it will last forever, but that's a lot of Tootsie Rolls.

A $279 Tree

So what kind of tree do you put up?  Should we invest (and it would be an investment) in an artificial one?  Or should we keep buying  real ones?