Where were you on July 7? It was World Chocolate Day! If you weren’t wolfing down a few pounds of the stuff, you were negligent. The chocolate cops are going to come after you.

But not to worry. Milk Chocolate Day is coming up on July 28. There’s an International Chocolate Day on Sept. 13, and if you miss that, there’s White Chocolate Day on Sept. 22, and National Chocolate Day on Oct. 28 and yet another National Chocolate Day on Dec. 28, just a couple weeks after National Cover Anything in Chocolate Day, Dec. 16, on which date all businesses and government offices will be closed so that people can stay home and do what needs to be done.

We have chocolate today thanks to the Mayans, who were enjoying xocolatl for 34 centuries before Christopher Columbus discovered it on his fourth voyage to India. (Lest history judge him wrong, let it be known that when he came across several local people paddling a canoe full of cocoa, he stole it.)

The Mayans consumed xocolatl as a hot beverage. The Aztecs imported it and drank it cold, or at least as cold as it gets in Mexico. They called the drink cacahuatl, literally “cacao water.”

Both peoples associated cacahuatl with human sacrifice because the brew looked like blood. The Spanish thought it looked like something else, so for marketing purposes, they dumped the “caca-” and opted for a brand name more like xocolatl.

But don’t let such facts ruin your Cover Anything in Chocolate in Day.

(Etymological pause: caca dates back to the Proto-Indo-European ancestor of several modern languages. Derivatives of caca appear in Spanish, Greek, Russian, Hebrew, Gaelic, Finnish, Turkish, Icelandic, and Persian (but not Aztec), always referring to you-know-what. Our “poppiecock” comes from a Dutch word, pappe kak, meaning “diarrhea.” Derivatives also pop up in cacophony (bad sound), coprophagy (bad job) and kakistocracy (bad government.)

As long as we’re on words, let’s clarify something you’ve always wondered: cocoa is the fruit of the cacao tree.

We know where caca, cocoa and cacao come from, but we have no idea where National Cover Anything in Chocolate Day comes from other than the obvious fact that she was an absolute genius.

While the plethora of chocolate-based holidays seem to have the year well covered, there are still opportunities for a place like New London as it struggles to make a name for itself.

There is no chocolate capital anywhere.

There is no Chocolate Hall of Fame.

There is no statue dedicated to chocolate.

There is no statue made of chocolate.

There is no statue that has been dipped in chocolate.

There is no official celebration of Cover Anything in Chocolate Day.

So here’s a question: How much of this confectionary vacuum could a city like, say, New London fill?

As New London struggles to draw the world’s attention — and ideally some of its money, too — maybe chocolate is the key, the Punxsutawney Phil that puts the city on the media map.

So here’s the plan: Every National Cover Anything in Chocolate Day, with all due pomp and ceremony, the city should dip its toppled statue of Christopher Columbus in a vat of bubbling dark chocolate. What better way to honor the first European to steal cocoa beans?

Such an event would certainly garner as much media attention as a groundhog. The world is nuts about chocolate. Global annual sales are $83 billion, half of it in Europe. The United States consumes only 18% of it. The British each eat an average of 24 pounds of it each year, about as much seafood as they eat. Americans, paragons of temperance, eat only half that much.

A few West African countries produce 60% of the world’s cocoa, but the entire African continent consumes only 3.28% of the world’s chocolate.

And that brings us to the dark side to chocolate. Though the world loves the stuff, cocoa farmers in Ivory Coast, which produces more than any other nation, earn less than a third of the U.N. poverty level of $2 a day. In that country and Ghana, 2.1 million children work in cocoa fields, and an estimated 12,000 of them in Ivory Coast are slaves subjected to harsh and abusive conditions.

Governments and chocolate companies have vowed to do something about the situation, but according to The Cocoa Barometer, “Not a single company or government is anywhere near reaching their commitments of a 70% reduction of child labour by 2020.”

Maybe dipping a statue in boiling chocolate will give certain kakistocratic government and corporate authorities something to think about.

Glenn Cheney is a writer, translator, and managing editor of New London Librarium. He can be reached at glenn@nllibrarium.com.