Halloween for my family is a celebration of playful childhood. Wearing fanciful costumes, visiting and being visited by loving friends and eating chocolate are all embraced.

Now, chocolate that is tainted by slavery and oppressive labor conditions has to go, for I have studied 1991 BBC documentary which first broght this matter to public attention, the Knight-Ridder series and much more.

The memory of my sons as delighted firemen, happy in clown suits with honker noses so much more is not marred by today's knowledge.

It is today that I know.

It is today that both the secular ethics and faith require of me one quietly raised voice and the action I can bring to bear against the slavery, near-slavery, below-poverty wages and unsafe conditions.

Matters have apparently changed very little in the half decade since Mali's Save the Children Fund director, Salia Kante, spoke to BBC of child chocolate workers:

"People who are drinking cocoa or coffee are drinking their blood.It is the blood of young children carrying 6kg of cocoa sacks so heavy that they have wounds all over their shoulders. It's really pitiful to see."

Earlier this year in The Globe and Mail of Toronto, Save the Children Canada CEO David Morely wrote:

But still, not much has changed for most children working in the cocoa fields. Recent visits by Save the Canada staff to cocoa farms in Latin America, Africa and the Caribbean found low bean prices, low wages, demanding and hazardous work, few heath and education services. We have given these findings to industry leaders with our offer to work with them to change child labour practices in growing and harvesting of cocoa.

As a first, small step, the only chocolate and coffee I'm buying has the fair trade label.

That will not stop the traffic of kidnapped children into slavery on the West African cocoa farms, and the employment at sub-poverty wages under what in this country would be criminal conditions of a great many others.

Changing those conditions is a complex matter.

Being choosy about my chocolate and coffee is simply an honest start, while I decide how this one Southern man can best address the politics of the issue.

              

"Unwaged work" sounds so much less disturbing than " slave labor, " don't you think?

Really, we are just talking about children who live in India who are working in "filthy conditions," without pay and motivated by "threats and beatings" to make garments for the sweetly promoted "Gap Kids" clothing line.

After all, in 2004 GAP fired a passel of subcontractors for using child labor, and says it has launched an internal investigation of this, er, ah, incident.

Ok.

The child-slave-made clothing is heading for the Christmas market. As the Guardian's Dan McDougall explained:

The Observer discovered the children in a filthy sweatshop working on piles of beaded children's blouses marked with serial numbers that Gap admitted corresponded with its own inventory. The company has pledged to convene a meeting of its Indian suppliers as well as withdrawing tens of thousands of the embroidered girl's blouses from the market, before they reach the stores. The hand-stitched tops, which would have been sold for about £20, were destined for shelves in America and Europe in the next seven days in time to be sold to Christmas shoppers.

Cranking up a nice fit of outraged astonishment seems to my ear just a shade more than a trifle disingenuous.

Contracting for the production of cut-rate embroidered textile products from the third world almost inevitalbly means contracting for child labor, as the Guardian also gently explained:

Professor Sheotaj Singh, co-founder of the DSV, or Dayanand Shilpa Vidyalaya, a Delhi-based rehabilitation centre and school for rescued child workers, said he believed that as long as cut-price embroidered goods were sold in stores across Britain, America, continental Europe and elsewhere in the West, there would be a problem with unscrupulous subcontractors using children.

As a Christmas season alternative, I plan to make use of directories like and including the alternative shopping sources promoted by GAP/Old Navy/Banana Republic critics.

In the same spirit, there will be far less chocolate on my Christmas gift and menu list.

Slavery is far too complex a problem to be solved by such strategies, and I do not propose boycott-like actions as a solution.

They are a way of speaking against child slavery, rather than avoidably using any part of my Christmas budget to vote for child slavery. If enough of us seek to be part of the solution, we may find one.