I have for some time now felt quite divided between the idea that something cheap is a good deal or a bad one.      While I can appreciate low prices and see the value of a free market, I wonder at times how an item could cost as little as it does.      A casual trip to a well-known cheap store the other day left me with a kind of tightness in the stomach. Despite the differences in cost of living, are those tiny prices fair deals?      I listened to Chinese activist Harry Wu on the radio the other day. From what he says, the Laogai prison camps are still mysterious sources of products that could be found around the world. I certainly wonder if they make it to our markets.      My earliest concerns about this subject were over reports of child labor and sweat shops. That awareness led me to appreciate products that carry little tags that say: "fair trade" or "no child labor used to make this product." But I would be kidding myself to think that I can actually monitor the source of everything I buy.      I have for some time now shopped at a wonderful place in Brookline called "Ten Thousand Villages." I know they care for their suppliers.      Their Web site www.tenthousandvillages.com defines fair trade as a "trading partnership based on dialogue, transparency and respect." They state that fair trade's key principles include creating opportunities for economically disadvantaged producers, capacity building, (meaning that they indeed take time to teach management skills and connect them to new markets) and participation of children only if it does not interfere with their well-being.      I was pleased to become better acquainted with these specifically open guidelines that I hope are followed. I see the loss in having children fully scratched from any involvement in production because of fear of exploitation.      As a TV journalist in Brazil I interviewed several times a woman who seemed to have found a solution to help a full neighborhood via a creative project called Salao do Encontro.      For this non-profit organization devoted to furniture-making along with rug weaving, basketry and farming, Noeme Gontijo hired full families, including children starting at age 13. By many accounts, she was wrong, because legally, they should have been 14 to be able to work. However, she hired them part-time, demanded that they stay in schools, offered them nutritious meals, monitored and supported their homework time, gave them dental care and included them in special counseling sessions that kept them away from drug dealers. "If I wait till they are 14," she once told me, "it is often too late."      According to the Fair Trade Resource Network, "In North America, Fair Trade products have been primarily craft products -- decorative home accessories, jewelry, iles, ceramics, etc. Fairly traded coffee, tea and chocolate are also available."      I have recently been introduced to fair trade coffee and chocolate via my church. When a friend who came over liked the chocolate, she read the label: "Produced in Switzerland for Equal Exchange."      A more careful reading tells me that Equal Exchange is a worker-owned Fair Trade Organization. Their certified organic cocoa is grown by farmers in a cooperative in the Dominican Republic and another in the Andean highlands of Central Peru. They also use organic sugar, which is again "Fair Trade Certified" imported from small farmer cooperatives in Paraguay and Costa Rica.      I was pleased to know it was not chocolate from the Ivory Coast, where children are forced to work in cocoa farms. The UN says that profits for this trafficking amount to approximately $7 billion a year (Anti-Slavery International).      According to the newsletter from Global Exchange, a human rights organization, "many Starbucks cafes will brew a pot of Fair Trade -- but only if specifically asked. Meanwhile Fair Trade Coffee has yet to be promoted as the brewed Coffee of the Day, which is the only way to ensure real volume for Fair Trade Farmers."      They say that coffee farmers around the world are becoming poorer all the time because of low prices, while we still pay high prices for the coffee we consume. You can make a difference by going to www.globalexchange.org and clicking on Act Now, to ask Starbucks to be fair.      I have known for a few years the Yayla Tribal Rugs in Cambridge. While they are a for-profit company, they are linked to Barakat Inc. which is a non-profit organization to help refugees from the rug weaving countries as well as environmental organizations and also to Cultural Survival, another non-profit linked to the protection of endangered people's and cultures around the world.      A caring connection to the source is what makes a company the special place we are pleased to relate to.      So, as we approach a time to give thanks and enter the season of shopping, here's how I intend to bring meaning and significance to my personal holidays in new ways.      As much as possible, I will shop fair trade. (I welcome suggestions of places you know) I will also take the advice of a new book called "The Hundred Dollar Holiday" by Bill McKibben, which I discovered via the simple living network (www.simpleliving.net) Their ideas may bring new meaning to holidays everywhere.