In 2009 the amount was $41.2 billion. Last year saw impressive growth, moving up to $45 billion. That’s almost a $4 billion increase in a single calendar year. It may sound like Wall Street employee bonus checks, but this is the amount of money Americans spent at retailers on the four-day Black Friday weekend, which includes Cyber Monday.

That’s roughly $11 billion spent per day, primarily on consumer electronics and the accessories and media that make them hum. Throughout the entire holiday season–essentially Black Friday through
Christmas day–more than $450 billion was spent last year in the United States. This, on top of the billions we spend the other 360 days of the year on the same products. It’s hard not to pass judgment on this type of frivolous spending, particularly when there are so many needy people in the world, in our own neighborhoods. To be sure, many of these purchases are intended to brighten the holidays for a lot of unfortunate children and families, which has given me and my family time to reflect on just what holiday giving is all about, and how we could change our pattern to better reflect our personal desires to live in a better world.

For a lot of years we made “Christmas Angel” purchases at our local shopping mall, helping to meet the specific requests for underprivileged kids. We don’t have a lot of money, but we certainly have more than so many others and knew we could easily help a child or two have the same bright and cheery Christmas morning as our own child. This form of giving brings our family a lot of happiness, but we’ve always wanted to do more.

We started looking for charitable organizations that were already helping children around the world, primarily to see if we could find a really good fit. In short, we want our charitable donations to do the most good. Our search yielded a great deal of exciting and even inspiring information. Did you know that for a measly $4,500 nearly 500 people in Sudan and Sierra Leone, Africa can drink clean water from their own well? For $6,500 the same number of people in Uganda and Kenya can get the same clean, fresh drinking water so badly needed. The amount of money spent on one holiday weekend in the United States could build 10 million freshwater wells.

Now, they don’t need that many wells, but that’s the point. If we spent a mere 10% less on just Black Friday weekend and put that $4.5 billion into a charity like The Water Project or the Advent Conspiracy through its partnership with Living Water International, we could effectively end the very serious and lethal water problems in these four African countries, which include drought and contamination.

We looked further into this and discovered that $10 will provide fresh drinking water for one person for an entire year. Ten lousy bucks! $50 will help an entire family, and $250 will provide fresh water to an entire classroom for a whole year.

Less than a twenty-five percent of what is spend over Black Friday weekend, and approximately two percent of what is spent throughout the holidays–$10 billion– will solve this problem once and for all.

Can you imagine these Central African nations with no water-related problems? So can we, which is why we’ve made a couple of important choices this year. As in years past, we’ll eschew Black Friday and all its trappings, and we’ll ensure that we help an entire classroom have fresh, clean drinking water for an entire year. Won’t you join us?

Imagine what we could do for hunger!

Tim is a marketer for Cabledeal.org. He is an avid promoter of global issues and prayerfully wishes there was more he could do to help those with true needs. To learn more about Tim and to see what he is up to follow him on Twitter @TimLCooley.