In the dreary early months of the year, Hallmark holidays like Mother’s Day converge with religious holidays like Easter and Passover, creating widespread demand for large quantities of treats. These are the times when chocolatiers have opportunities to generate substantial amounts of income that, properly budgeted, can carry them through the quiet days of summer and into the fall, when Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hannukkah and Valentine’s Day boost demand once more.

It’s a cycle that Ryan Stepp, the chief candymaker at Donells Candies in downtown Casper, and his family have grown well-accustomed to in their more than 60 years in business, planning current and future production on a schedule that seemed more or less unshakable. After all, what could be more reliable to plan around than the days on the calendar?

Then — at the height of one of their most important times of the year — the COVID-19 pandemic hit and sales tanked, all but costing them the most important candymaking holiday of the year: Easter Sunday.

“Our sales were down about 35 percent from previous years,” Stepp said. “I mean, more than a third. Honestly, that’s a big, big chunk for anybody to take.”

Where the calendar had long promised their shop certainty, Donells Candies now faced a now unfamiliar future, where restrictions on businesses — as well as people’s own reluctance to go outside — had turned the days and weeks into enemies. With each day of lost income, Stepp’s business faced the prospect of losing employees they needed to produce the next season’s batch of goods, and of losing customers to better-positioned corporate chains like Walmart if they were deemed “non-essential.”

Luckily, that never happened, Stepp said. But times were still hard. With less foot traffic, the company had to resort to mailing their products all over the country, picking up customers wherever they were lucky to find them. But that alone, Stepp said, wasn’t enough.

Donells Candies, while not doing as well as they once were, is still producing candy. All of its workers — except for one, who temporarily left her job to care for her children — are still employed and getting paid. And it’s largely thanks to the Small Business Administration’s Paycheck Protection Program, which as of last week had infused more than $800 million in forgivable loans to businesses across all of Wyoming.

While not enough to make up for that loss of revenue, Stepp said, the loans have been enough to essentially allow his business to press “pause” and continue on their business cycle interrupted, but alive — a critical component of bringing Main Streets back to viability after the worst impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic are behind.

“With us, with a loss of sales, you’ve got to cut back the number of man hours that you provide,” Stepp said. “Obviously, we produce ... almost everything in-house. So now when our sales go down, so does our production, which means our employees hours are going to go down. That’s just the nuts and bolts of any business.”

Similar stories have been unfolding across the country. However, while specific numbers are not yet available in Wyoming, demand is still out there for businesses across the state seeking a similar lifeline.

Last week, the SBA began to roll out its second tranche of PPP funding for businesses with a specific focus on flowing funding through community banks who had faced disadvantages in the first round of funding to larger banks on the coasts. Meanwhile, Gov. Mark Gordon and the Wyoming Legislature have been working to funnel hundreds of millions of dollars in emergency federal relief through a small business lending program of their own for businesses shut out of the first few rounds of PPP funding, which will potentially be approved in a special session of the Legislature this week.

That money could help to make up disparities in what types of businesses were approved for those loans: According to an analysis of SBA loans approved in round one of funding, the state of Nebraska got enough money from the PPP to cover 81 percent of the state’s eligible payrolls, more than double the share in states like New York (40 percent) and California (38 percent).

Wyoming businesses, meanwhile, were approved at a rate of 67 percent, according to that data, lagging behind other, neighboring states like North and South Dakota (78 and 79 percent, respectively) and Montana (70 percent).

Whatever happens in the coming months, Stepp said he hopes local businesses — and the culture of community they help to cultivate — are the ones that come out poised to help lead the recovery to follow.

“You know, local businesses and retailers are going to provide that customer service as best as they can,” he said. “When you’ve got that ability to reach out and touch somebody locally, that you know, even if it’s by phone, like, ‘Hey, I’m right up the street, and I want to come in and get that T-shirt that you had advertised on your Facebook page, you know, do you have this size?’ I can just run out back and grab it for them, and bring it out to them. You’re not gonna get that by calling Walmart.”