I can distinctly remember when Memorial Day was called Decoration Day. 

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/05/memorial_day_connecting_the_past_with_the_present.html

In my small hometown there was always a program at the local cemetery at the beginning of the day to honor the fallen hometown heroes. Taps was played, and then a parade featuring the veterans from many of the wars carrying flags for the nation, the state and some others I don't remember. 

Then there was a "town parade" where both of my sisters played in the high school marching band, and everyone along the curbs watching the parade had one of those small flags on a wooden stick and would wave them at every passing band, float, and other parade entry.  It was a glorious celebration of Life even though it represented the horrible war deaths accumulated over a couple of hundred years - or more.

My family always had a picnic out at the local lake after all the in-town festivities were over.  Seems like the weather was warmer by the end of May back in the 1950's and 1960's.  I only remember it raining on one occasion because it was the first year I could ride a bicycle and Dad had agreed to put it in the back of the car so it would travel with us to the lake and I could ride it down the "big hill" - and then it rained and spoiled everything for me.  There was a huge valley where all the picnic tables and the "school type" swingset and teeter-totter and merry-go-round were set up.  Riding a bike down that long hill would have been memorable. 

The picnic area had several "house" type buildings built from local rocks (built, incidently, during the depression years when the CWA and the WPA were formed to build fences and buildings out of rock all over my state, don't know about other states tho), and each one had long, wooden "windows" and the wood could be unhooked and laid out flat to form a serving area from inside the building.  The year it rained, we all ended up eating inside the building, of course, but it eventually stopped raining and we could go out and play on the wet swings and stuff.  Still, we had fun.  That was the same lake/park area where we always had the school picnics just a couple of weeks before Memorial Day. 

Sad, but that whole area is closed down now because the bridge entering into the park was washed out a couple of years ago and the county decided it could not afford to rebuild, so the whole area just flooded into one huge lake that can only be accessed on foot.  Luckily it was located in a valley (of which there weren't many in the area where I grew up - - it was pretty damned flat for the most part!) so the flooding did not damage anything else.