The holiday season, long looming, is officially upon us yet again.

And, as everyone begins thinking about the weekend’s sales — Black Friday, Small Business Saturday and Cyber Monday — we hope that people are remembering to prioritize shopping at their local businesses.

To that end, coming in tomorrow’s edition of The Express — our Thanksgiving edition, since there is no paper on the day itself — will be our annual gift guide, featuring some quick information about some of the sales and specials various Downtown Lock Haven businesses have going on.

We will also be running extra gift guide content on our website, lockhaven.com, although most of that will be a little more afield. Hopefully, though, it might spark some ideas as you begin your Christmas gift shopping — you have started, right? — and you can look locally for some analogues to those ideas.

Recall the lessons of closed businesses past this holiday season: if you do not support local businesses with your purchasing habits, your favorite business may close its doors and then you will be left making a post on social media about how “it’s such a shame.”

If you want a flourishing local scene with a variety of shops and stores, you have to support it and help it grow. It’s not something that can happen in a vacuum.

That’s not to say that all of your shopping must be local, of course — sometimes the perfect gift idea just isn’t something that’s really feasible to find around here and must be ordered in.

But, where possible, try to show support where you can. And even when shopping online, there are a lot of small businesses with web storefronts that you can purchase from. If the money isn’t coming back to our community anyway, it may as well at least go to some community — and not to some giant corporation’s shareholder report.

It’s no secret that to our community and those like it across the nation, money is one of the things that is most needed and in shortest supply.

Consider: if you spend 20 of your hard-earned dollars on an Amazon purchase, a fraction of that money will find its way back into our community by way of taxes, shipping and handling, and potentially eventual resale or repurposing. If, instead, you spend that same money on a local purchase, far more of that money will stay in the area.

That money will, in turn, be used variously to keep people in the area and to keep the doors of local business open and inviting. In some cases, that money will be recycled throughout the system and contributed to campaigns by local organizations to feed people in need, or to provide much-appreciated grants or scholarships.

We find it helpful to think of our local economy as an ecosystem — resonant, perhaps, because of our region’s natural beauty, but it’s also something that just makes sense.

If, instead of watering your garden, you were to water a garden 200 miles away and hope that the water will eventually cycle through and re-enter your back yard as rain…well, it might eventually…but you’re going to be waiting a very, very long time, and in the mean time your plants will wither and die.

It’s far better to just water your plants yourself and ensure both that your water goes where it needs to and also stays in the local system, where it can help keep the ecosystem alive for many more years to come.

You see, there’s a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy of doom that we, as a small city, need to fight against.

Many local economies, on a scale from Main Streets to malls to whole towns, have struggled with the sentiments of “well, there’s nothing to buy” or “well, it’s just too expensive.” Those sentiments fester, and in turn end up becoming reinforced — as businesses close and shoppers continue to go elsewhere, there becomes fewer options and those options that remain become more expensive as their competition dwindles.

The cure to this? Establish connections with your local businesses. If they don’t have something that you’re looking for specifically see if they can order it in — if they can’t right now, they’ll at least make a note of it for the future when they can.

Try shopping with understanding, not judgment. Yes, when you shop local, you are, in most cases, probably paying more than if you looked for a similar item online.

But by supporting those businesses despite that fact, you are not only contributing to the local community now — you are contributing to the future of the local community as well.

You are working to build a better future, where small businesses can claw back more market share and become more competitive; a future where we still have a Main Street and you can still work with local businesspeople to help the town survive and, maybe, one day, thrive.

As we’ve said before — and doubtlessly will again — we understand that sometimes it isn’t in the cards. We all must make decisions with our own bottom lines in mind, and the holidays can be expensive enough even shopping the lowest prices we can manage.

But if you can find it in your budget — or couch cushions — to get even just one gift locally this year, it will help.

Imagine if we all did that, what a difference it could make.