I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream.

Chocolate ice cream has been a food staple in my life for as long as I can remember. When I was a little girl, a bowl of chocolate ice cream was the nightly dessert for my brother and me.

When I was pregnant with my first child, my husband and I would make a nightly trek to the Baskin Robbins in Starkville, and I would order a triple scoop of, you guessed it, chocolate ice cream.

I am pretty sure my love of the frozen food is hereditary. My paternal grandfather would always have to have a bowl of vanilla ice cream following a meal, and my dad can never say no to a bowl of the homemade mixtures.

For me, not much could ever take the place of the chocolate varieties, except Dad’s special Orange Crush recipe.

I still have fond memories from neighborhood gatherings of Saturday afternoons in Marion Park when Dad would cook hamburgers on the grill, and for dessert, he made the sherbet ice cream.

During the summer months this was a ritual with our neighbors, and us kids would sit around the electric ice cream maker and watch with anticipation as the rock salt slowly melted.

Talk about “sweet” times.

I have never had to have a special reason to dip out a scoop of ice cream, but it has just recently come to my attention Sunday is National Ice Cream Day.

Apparently, for the past 32 years, since President Ronald Reagan proclaimed July as National Ice Cream Month and established National Ice Cream Day as the third Sunday in the month of July, folks have been celebrating and enjoying this day with a bowl, cup or cone filled with their favorite flavor of ice cream.

Well, I can tell you this, I did not need a National Ice Cream Day to enjoy the sweet treat, since I have been indulging a lot longer than three decades.

However, after discovering Sunday is a day I should highlight on my calendar, I continued to peruse the website where I found out about National Ice Cream Day.

Did you know that Ben Franklin, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were like me and ate ice cream on a regular basis?

First Lady Dolly Madison served ice cream at the Inaugural Ball in 1813.

I am sure it was a cool party!

And according to this website, thousands of years ago, people in the Persian Empire put snow in a bowl, poured grape-juice concentrate over it and ate it as a treat.

When the weather was hot, they used the snow saved in the cool-keeping underground chambers known as “yakhchal,” or they used the snowfall that still remained at the top of mountains by the summer capital.

I am sure glad I do not have to hike up a mountain for a scoop.

Today, it is thought there are more than 1,000 flavors of ice cream.

So with this many options and the temperatures expected in the high nineties, I hope you all will enjoy National Ice Cream Day.

I plan to do so!