Small businesses are an important lifeblood to any economy. They may be the seed that later becomes an enormous business, but even if that never happens, they are part of the nucleus that makes any given locality function.

We were pleased to see these businesses celebrated and promoted recently in Farmville on Small Business Saturday, a day founded by American Express.

“Small Business Saturday is a day dedicated to supporting small businesses and communities across the country,” according to AmericanExpress.com, which also noted that the day “is celebrated each year on the Saturday after Thanksgiving.”

We salute Hotel Weyanoke for welcoming several small business “pop-ups” into its lobby that Saturday from 11 a.m.-3 p.m. along with shoppers. It helped with general promotion of those enterprises and also made those ventures a featured option as people worked to take care of their holiday shopping.

Small Business Saturday also proved to be an effective day to start a new enterprise as Kate Pickett Eggleston’s and Pat Thorne’s HandMade, Inc. took off with its grand opening and has been thriving since.