Three Sundays ago (Dec 2), there was a choice of where to spend $10 for a good cause. For that amount, you could adopt a duck for the Straits Times Million Dollar Duck Race. Or you could register for the Walk For Aids.

At the Duck Race, your $10 adoption certificate stood a chance of winning you $300 to $10,000 with a possibility of a $1 million bonus provided your duck co-operated to reach the finish line.

At the Aids walk, the $10 registration fee got you a goodie bag of gifts worth $30.

The ducks won that day. The Million Dollar Duck Race raised $1 million while Action For Aids collected a little more than $2,000 from the walk.

The ducks won by a long mile. They had more to offer. Their race was bigger and better. And who could resist the spectacle of 99,000 yellow ducks specked with 1,000 red ones poured into the Singapore River?

And if that failed to captivate, entertainment was laid on along Clarke Quay in the form of music performances, story-telling, games and food.

On the other hand, the Aids walk was a do-it-yourself affair. Instead of being a passive audience, participants had to walk from the Youth Park at Somerset Road to the Istana and back -- in a heavy downpour which started as soon as the walk was flagged off.

Three charities will benefit from the Duck Race. If split equally, that would amount to over $300,000 each for the Straits Times School Pocket Money Fund, the Spastic Children Association of Singapore and Children At Risk Empowerment.

And the $2,000 raised by Action For Aids? That amount can barely stretch to pay for medication for two HIV patients for just one month (an optimum three-drug anti-retroviral regime costs between $1,200 to $1,500 a month).

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When you give, are you thinking of who benefits? Or are you mentally calculating how much you will receive in terms of goodies and kickbacks?

If sponsors didn't spend what they did on freebies to lure participants, that amount of money could have gone to the recipients.

But if you didn't have a souvenir, would you go to the event? If you weren't enticed by $10,000 should your little ducky win the race, would you have adopted it?

And if $1 million wasn't paid out to a lucky contestant, wouldn't a charity be all the more luckier if it went directly to them instead?

Every festive season, we moan that Halloween is little more than a money-raking theme night at the pubs, that Christmas has been commercialised.

Now it looks like charity work has been commercialised too. If you don't lay on freebies and entertainment, don't expect a good turn-out.

Spare a thought this holiday season. Give a little something. And don't expect anything back. Just pay it forward.

Adeline Woon is a newspaper copy editor in Singapore.