LEWISTON – One woman just under 5 feet tall. Two stepladders. Three hundred ornaments. This year, they took two evenings to hang.

“Sometimes I even have more. Sometimes I even go up to 400,” Hilde Ginchereau said, pretending to grimace.

Ginchereau moved from Germany with her husband 44 years ago, and Christmas still reminds her of home. It’s why, each year, she goes all out on her tree. Ginchereau’s collection: More than a thousand ornaments. She picks a theme each year – snowmen, Santas, silver, white, red or gold – and pulls just those decorations each December.

The tree always goes up the week before Christmas.

“I keep them up every year until Three Kings’ Day (Jan. 6),” she said, running her hands along the end of one bough. “He’s holding the needles very good. I’m going to keep him a week more.”

She began collecting ornaments in 1960, the year she and husband Roger married. The Auburn man had been stationed in Germany, in the Army. They met at a soda fountain.

Among her favorite decorations: A shiny red mushroom on a fat, gold stem that’s more than 40 years old. “In Germany, that’s good luck. It belongs to the tree,” she said.

She likes to pick up a new Hummel ornament every year, but those get harder to find. The old Bradlees, Ginchereau said, used to be a place to find pretty bulbs from Romania.

“Ames, for a couple of years, they had beautiful bulbs, then, nothing more,” she said.

As a girl, her family used to sing and play instruments on Christmas Eve, attend midnight Mass, then come home, light real candles in the tree boughs and watch the tree. These days, in the evening, she likes to turn her tree lights on – gold lights, of course, to match this year’s gold theme – and watch the tree from her recliner.

She smiled and called all that climbing up and down the stepladders – making sure each bulb is placed just right – exercise.