It’s not as if we’ve had a shortage of goodies during the past month or two. Throughout the holiday season, various people in our office brought in a supply of yummy treats that would have put Santa’s wife to shame.

Cookies of all shapes and sizes, fruited breads you’d be unlikely to find in most bakeries, chocolate and nuts and candy and fruit and…. Well, you get the idea.

We’ve got to have something to keep us going during those long nights of writing stories and designing pages. For some of us, snacks provide that fuel. Sad to say, it’s pretty easy to tell which of us get our boost that way; we tend toward, shall I say, softer edges.

The snack parade — much like the unusually brutal schedule — is pretty much uninterrupted here from Thanksgiving through New Year’s Day. Even a short, round guy like me begins eventually to look for a break from the continual sugar-rush/sugar-crash cycle.

So I looked at the box that appeared in my desk chair the other day with apprehension approaching that of a recovering drug addict who had received a box of free samples in the mail.

In this case, though, the box wasn’t labeled Roche Laboratories or Pfizer Pharmaceuticals. Instead, there was a green logo with two words underneath — two words that strike terror in the hearts of dieters everywhere: Girl Scouts.

Uh oh.

I actually took the box home to open it, thinking to spare everyone here at the News-Herald the temptation that lurked inside. But they’re big boys and girls, and they should learn to be strong, I decided.

So now the kitchen table in our South Saratoga Street office is covered with brightly colored boxes of what I’m calling “preview cookies.” There are Thin Mints, Samoas, Trefoils, Do-Si-Dos, Lemon Chalet Cremes and Sugar-Free Chocolate Chip Cookies. There’s also the new Dulce de Leche, an unfair combination of cookie and caramel designed to drive the final wedge between a fat guy and his New Year’s resolution.

You’ll note that I didn’t mention Tagalongs.

There WAS a box of those perennial favorites when I put all the boxes on the table this morning. Soon afterward, though, I heard a jubilant cry from the kitchen, followed by some surprisingly and passionately possessive remarks about Tagalongs. Later, I noticed that the entire box was missing.

While it’s tempting to embarrass that person by naming him in connection with the public exposure of his hoarding behavior, I can tell an addiction when I see it, and this column is no intervention. I’d consider that more of a family responsibility.

My responsibility would be more along the lines of keeping those Dulce de Leche cookies safe. I’d better go back in there right now and make sure he won’t get them.