Our community is filled with heroes from the police and firemen who protect us to the soldiers who enlist and go overseas to fight for our freedom.

We appreciate and thank each of those heroes for the service.

But around the holidays, our community gets filed with even more heroes — people who care about our community’s livelihood.

Those heroes include the people who volunteered their time to organize and promote all of the Christmas in Natchez: City of Lights events. The events aim to bring an excitement that was previously missing to the holidays in Natchez and to coordinate a variety of events to constantly keep Christmas on everyone’s mind this year.

But if you aren’t among the men and women in uniform or the volunteers who put up lights and decorations, don’t fret. You, too, can be a hero, of sorts, this Christmas season, an economic hero.

By shopping for all of your Christmas gifts here, you can help make a huge difference in our community this year.

Your dollars mean so much to local people working in our local stores.

The money those stores generate in sales is turned over several times in our community from taxes they pay to the earnings employees make that, in turn, get spent locally as well.

The past two years have been difficult ones for our national economy and our local economy hasn’t been immune to the problems, either, but if we all stick together and spend most or all of our holiday shopping dollars in our community, it will make our Christmas just a little brighter.