Being Valentine’s month, February is our opportunity for shameless and unrestrained indulgence in chocolate. I realize that for many chocolate lovers, this is business as usual. You will also note that I frame this holiday not as a mere day but as a protracted celebration of chocolate. Our only regret should be that February is the shortest month on the calendar.

My own relationship to chocolate got off to a rocky start. When I was a small child, I sneezed or wheezed or something, and a draconian allergist forbade me to eat chocolate. This was in the ’60s when every American mother, already confused by Dr. Spock, was told that her child had food allergies. Unfortunately, my own mother wasn’t cynical enough to challenge medical wisdom and, even though I had never had an allergy attack specifically related to chocolate, I was sentenced to a desolate childhood of vanilla ice cream and pink birthday cake. Sometimes it’s too painful to think about.

Happily, the food allergy fad passed, and I was released from bondage. If I suffered any enduring psychological damage from early chocolate deprivation, I have done my best to ameliorate its effects by making up for lost time. With the exception of fruit pies in summer and the occasional cheesecake, I really don’t do nonchocolate desserts.

I am one of the millions of Americans who reveres chocolate as a nutritional food group. I also suspect there are enough people like me that if we ever organized ourselves as a voting bloc, we would be running the government.

For anyone looking for a chocolate immersion experience, the Baldwin Arts Council’s annual chocolate auction will be from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday in the Baldwin High School commons. The event this year is in honor of Alice Ann Callahan Russell, a longtime Baldwin arts activist who died last year.

To kick off the month, I’m offering a cookie recipe (found on page 3E) from the “Rosie’s Bakery Cookie Book” by Judy Rosenberg.