Need a swim cover-up? Will a sheepskin coat work for you?

It’s the mid-summer holiday weekend, temperature in the upper 20s, feeling like 30 or so, maybe some thundershowers.

So of course you’re shopping for fleece-lined mittens, insulated snow boots, a hooded down parka with a faux fur collar and a heavy wool sweater to wear under it.

So what if you’re dripping with humidity. How about a cashmere scarf to wrap around your neck?

What? You’re going to the beach instead? In your bathing suit?

The Great Seasonal Disconnect between what’s happening outside in nature and what’s happening inside the shopping mall is upon us again.

Retailers regard the weather forecast and the calendar as pure fiction.

Hurry, hurry, my Dollar Store seems to be suggesting with its growing display of Halloween decorations.

Better buy them now or they’ll be gone by the middle of August, only to be replaced with Christmas decorations — or Valentine hearts. Easter bunnies anyone?

I’m waiting for some eager merchandiser to look so far ahead they start stocking pool and sand toys, patio ware and garden tools right about now — in preparation for next spring, of course. The worst perpetrators of seasonal disconnection are the clothing stores.

Say you leave your bathing suit behind at somebody’s cottage. Don’t even imagine you’ll be able to buy another one — unless it’s a leftover clearance-priced size 2 fire engine red bikini or size 18 lavender swim dress — before next January.

That’s when bathing suits, shorts and halter tops take over the racks, and you’re in the store looking fruitlessly for fleece-lined mittens to replace the ones you lost.

The biggest problem with seasonal disconnection is how it affects shopping for kids.

Every parent knows that if you buy a school wardrobe for a growing child on August 1st, it will be too small by the time school gets underway.

Worse, it will no longer be new because what kid will wait a month or so to wear the coveted new cool clothes and shoes? So the new school wardrobe will not only be ill-fitting, it will also be old, probably stained and possibly ripped.

Then there’s always the possibility that whatever was coveted and cool-looking in the summer will be so far off-trend by September that any self-respecting kid would rather wear a Boston Red Sox t-shirt to school than appear in the old new clothes that are no longer in style.

Still, there’s one big advantage to the stores being out of synch with the season: saving money.

Many of us don’t see any sense in shopping for things we won’t need for months to come.