I confess that I am not a very good shopper. There are certain stores, mostly hardware, farm, and home improvement stores, where I don’t mind going to the store for specific items and making a purchase. From time to time, I might look at other items while I am in the store. I’ve been known to spend a few minutes in the tool department just to see what they have. I don’t mind grocery shopping. But when it comes to things like clothes, home decor, and general merchandise, I don’t have much patience at all. There is a shopping mall in Bellingham. I’ve never been there by myself. We went there to shop for back to school clothes with our grandchildren yesterday. I’m pretty sure that the last time I was in the mall was when we did back to school shopping last year. By the time we had visited three stores with three grandchildren, I was about worn out. To their credit, our grandchildren are pretty good shoppers. They have a sense of what they are looking for. They don’t get too distracted with other items. They are pretty good at making up their minds. Sometimes, however, it is difficult to find just what you’re looking for. Yesterday a pair of pants and a sweater eluded us. The rest of the items on our list were fairly easy to find.

Our outing included lunch in the food court, a somewhat crowded and very noisy place where I have trouble hearing and understanding conversations. The restaurant, part of a national chain, is a favorite of our grandchildren and they were having a good time.

If you are a person who enjoys shopping malls, you have probably noticed that you’ll occasionally see an elderly gentleman, sitting on one of the benches in the middle of the mall with a confused look on his face. I’ve pretty much become that gentleman.

The shopping mall, like shopping malls across the country, is showing signs of decline. There are several retail spaces, including at least one large anchor store, that are vacant. One of those large spaces is currently filled with a Halloween specialty shop. They have fully decked out the store windows with advertising and large banners showing some of the costumes that they have for sale. I had quite a conversation with our youngest granddaughter about one of the costumes that was particularly frightening to her when we drove by the front of the store looking for a parking place. I assured her that I had no intention of going into that store to shop. She wasn’t the only one who was relieved that we could accomplish our mission without walking through that store.

I am amazed that there is enough business to support a store dedicated to a single one-day holiday. A quick Internet search reveals that there are at least three Halloween specialty stores open in Bellingham. You can chose from Spirit of Halloween, Halloween City, and SpookShop.

And Halloween is a ways away. The mall store’s website has a countdown on the home page so I know it is “Only 64 Days Until HALLOWEEN!” The website doesn’t mention the one Halloween item that I will be purchasing: treats to give out to the children in our neighborhood. It does, however, list 86 different categories of costume themes. You can get costumes with 50’s, 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s themes. Flapper and Gangster costumes are a different category than Roaring 20’s costumes. I didn’t see a category for 1930’s costumes, however. They’ve got Grim Reaper, Nerd, Mermaid and Hippy Costumes (as distinct from 60’s costumes, I guess). You can buy Angel, Butterfly, Princess and Shark Costumes. Costumes come in sizes for boys, girls, toddlers, babies, women, men, plus size, couples and groups. The group page on the website displays 24 costumes per page and there are seven pages of options. The store also sells decorations, animatronics, games, and accessories.

We closed on the house where we live on October 12 last year. We moved in just in time for halloween. It is a big deal in our neighborhood. We had neighbors with giant inflatable decorations, sound effects, and special lighting. I’m pretty sure all of those things are available at the Halloween store.

I’m also pretty sure that I have no intention of going to the Halloween store. I can enjoy enough costumes by watching the children of our neighborhood from my front porch. I will need to have a larger supply of treats to give out than we had on hand last year, but I’m likely to make a few purchases at the grocery store or a stop at Target. After all, the websites for the Halloween stores don’t mention that they sell treats to hand out.

We won’t be purchasing animatronics or inflatables to adorn our yard. We don’t have a very big yard anyway.

I did, however, find out one reason the Halloween stores are open so early. One animatronic clown listed on the web site can be purchased with four interest free payments. These things are really expensive!

When I was growing up we had a few rules about Halloween at our house. One was that only children 12 and younger could go trick-or-treating. It was a children’s holiday in our town. There were a few inexpensive Halloween costumes available at the stores in town, but I’m not sure that I ever had more than a mask that was commercially purchased. We pretty much subscribed to making costumes out of old clothes we found in the attic. You know, “I’ll put a sheet over my head and you’ll pretend you’re scared.”

The Halloween stores with their huge inventories explain a couple of other things about the place where we live. Our neighborhood is short of parking, with many people parking their cars on the street. Their garages are full of Halloween decorations. There are at least a half dozen large rental storage space facilities within a couple of miles of our subdivision. They are probably all full of Halloween decorations, too. Even if you leave your Halloween decorations up for a week, that’s 51 other weeks of the year when they are in storage. And if they get buried under all of the other things you’ve got stored, there’s a shop ready to sell you more decorations in the mall.