MIDDLESEX TWP — Owning a castle decorated year-round with Christmas trees, Santa suits, spooky masks and rainbow-colored clown shoes is part of the reason Jean Benton's laugh is so naturally contagious.

Another is her life's motto: “Make good memories,” she says as often as she can fit it into every chat. “If you don't make them, you don't have them.”

Benton believes no one who dons one of the thousands of costumes offered at her store, Costumes Etc!, escapes memory making.

“Whether it's a pig nose or a full-blown costume, the minute you put one on, everything changes,” says Benton, 69, who recently began the process of turning her life's work into a memory.

After three decades of renting and selling costumes, hats, wigs and holiday decor, Benton is selling off inventory with plans to close and sell the landmark building at 1095 Pittsburgh Road.

The store has been family-run since the day they first converted the former single story gas station into a double decker castle in the mid-1980s.

But with the death of Larry Benton, 71 — Jean's husband and the store's “big thinker, brain child, creator and maintenance man” — in 2012, it's been more difficult and partially remote. Jean and her daughter Michaelena, who goes by “Mikey,” have been mainly living in Colorado.

So now, mixed in among the store's flashy, fun and vivid wares are signs of a different sort: “Everything must go.”

It all started with a helium tank.

As a young mother of four, Benton bought a helium tank and was selling balloons for extra money. When the soon-to-be prime real estate location opened up, the decision was made to give the balloon business a location.

The store was transformed into its first castle incarnation in the mid-1980s.

But then the clowns came, Jean said, and they said they were looking for a good place to buy make up. So the Bentons went to New York City and invested in about 25 costumes and miscellaneous capes and goods. Additions of outfits to buy or rent have been made ever since, including four rooms of Christmas supplies and more than 40 full-sized Christmas trees decorated to themes.

“It's my profitable hobby,” Jean says, thumbing through page after page in four scrap books on the store.

The store offers elaborate dresses to cater to weddings and Renaissance festivals. There's a Christmas ornament to represent every hobby. Cowboy hats, superhero suits and petticoats rest in piles.

There are several pairs of platform pumps with goldfish in the heels.

One set of costumes though has remained top sellers from day one until today: “The Wizard of Oz. Dorothy, the Wicked Witch, all of them,” Jean says.

Just to share a few anecdotes, Jean retells the story of how she once picked up a relative at the airport dressed as a nun.

She speaks lovingly of how her late husband graduated from Laugh School in Columbus, Ohio, so he could visit hospitals, teaching patients how to laugh.

And Benton tears up in recalling a woman who bought bald caps so that every person attending her mother's birthday party could be bald. The woman's mother had cancer.

Jean also is a cancer survivor. After being diagnosed with breast cancer, her family painted her VW in a rainbow of colors to make her happy. Her doctor told her the car was scaring the cancer away, so she continues to drive it today 15 years later.

The car has 93,000 miles on it, and Benton is still healthy.

But her husband's illness was a bit of a surprise. He loved biking and was in phenomenal physical shape when he fell off the store's roof while Christmas decorating in 2011.

He wasn't seriously injured but that incident triggered the first sign something was wrong and he was diagnosed with ALS. Within two years, he was reduced to communicating by signals.

“But ALS always wins,” Jean says. “There is no cure. No one is going to beat it.”

After her father's death, Mikey joined her mother in Colorado and they tried to keep the business open. They decided to close in July, and plan to stay around long enough to sell off the bulk of the inventory. The store's six employees are aware of the plan.

When the costume stash whittles, Jean said she will make donations to theater groups and other organizations that have supported the store.