'This is living' -- Scenes from Thanksgiving Day 'This is living' -- Scenes from Thanksgiving Day (November 30, 2005)

The following text accompanied a series of photos by staff writer David Boyce that were published in the Almanac's print edition.

Thanksgiving Day can be an outdoors as well as an indoors holiday, and not always by choice.

For Menlo Park residents Skyler Thomas and his big brother Darius, above, the sidelines at Woodside High School's artificial-turf football field provided the perfect playground. Below, the big boys used the field for a vigorous pick-up game of tackle football.

"This isn't sports," said the Thomas boys' dad, commenting on the day to a sometime Almanac sports photographer. "This is living."

Meanwhile, at left, three men with nowhere to celebrate gathered on the sheltered bench behind the Menlo Park train station to talk away the morning and observe the quiet streets.

Things were slow at Ladera's Webb Ranch, too, where, below left, a young horse took a break from eating hay to scratch an itch on a welcome fence post.

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