"We are here today, 28 days before Christmas," Reverend Billy intones at the outset of his tour, to his home congregation in Greenwich Village, "behind so many layers of billboards, with supermodels looking down on us in their Christmas lingerie, billboards covered with fake Dickensian gingerbread lattes -- we're going to go out across this shopping-addicted country." He added later, "We will sit down and defeat the bulbous yellow feet of the most famous corporate logo in the world, and the one that has chosen to steal our children's imaginations for 80 years, the devil, Mickey Mouse."

En route to Disneyland from New York City, the reverend and his flock stop by the Mall of America in Minnesota, Wal-Mart's world headquarters in Bentonville, Ark., and numerous Starbucks and big-box stores like Target and Staples -- educating and engaging, confronting and confounding, with creative street theater and direct action. In Traer, Iowa, we meet Michael Reuman, whose clothing store has been open for more than 100 years: "Wal-Mart is killing small-town America. We've got two sons, and I have not encouraged either one of them to come back to the store. There's no future here."

This week, Charles Kernaghan of the National Labor Committee, standing in front of St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York, released a stunning report on the sweatshop conditions in which crucifixes are manufactured in China. St. Patrick's, Trinity Church in New York and the Association for Christian Retail all sell crucifixes traced to the Junxingye Factory in Dongguan, China. There, women as young as 15 work seven days a week, 14 hours a day, and earn only 9 cents per hour, after room and board are deducted from their pay. What would Jesus buy, indeed.

Black Friday is also "Buy Nothing Day" -- a global boycott of shopping and consumerism. Started by Kalle Lasn and his colleagues at Vancouver-based Adbusters magazine, Buy Nothing Day seeks to place the ad-fueled and news-media-supported shopping frenzy in a global context. He says, "Driving hybrid cars and limiting industrial emissions is great, but they are band-aid solutions if we don't address the core problem: We have to consume less."

The fair-trade movement is growing -- focusing on safe, organic products made locally, by people earning not just the legal minimum wage, but a living wage. Networks of sustainable businesses and nonprofit organizations are forming, linking producers with consumers, cutting out the corporations and the middlemen, allowing the people who make the items to get a larger share of the sale price. From clothing, to chocolate, to food, to flowers, to fuel, it is becoming increasingly easy to shop ethically. Heifer International features a selection of farm animals that you can sponsor, which the organization will deliver to a poor family in need elsewhere in the world.

This holiday season, spend time with family and friends -- it's worth more than money. Shop locally, or find a fair-trade store or Web site. Before walking into that big-box store, ask yourself, "What would Jesus buy?"

•

Amy Goodman is the host of "Democracy Now!," a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on 500 stations in North America.

© 2007 Amy Goodman