The Grandpa Abe Simpson Telling Kids Stories meme features a scene from The Simpsons showing grandfather Abe sitting on a stump telling the children of Springfield about the past. Millennials have turned this moment into a humorous text meme to reminisce about the good old days.
What is the Grandpa Abe Simpson Telling Kids Stories meme?
By most definitions, millennials are as old as 43 now, and many of them grew up watching The Simpsons. These days, however, they’re empathizing less with Bart and Lisa and more with old Grandpa Simpson.
The text tells tales from the 2000s or even the 1990s, explaining trends and technology that used to be popular and cutting-edge. Taking on the cadence of Abe Simpson telling one of his stories, they speak of a time before widespread streaming and modern social media.
Origins and spread
The meme’s image comes from season six, episode 24 of The Simpsons, titled “Lemon of Troy,” which aired in 1995. In the scene, just after the Springfield kids fight with children from the neighboring town, they gather around Grampa so he can give the amusing backstory that explains the ongoing rivalry between the two locations.
After the flashback to the founding of the towns, Grandpa explains that the founders marked the occasion with the planting of the lemon tree that serves as the focus of the episode.
“And to mark that sweet moment, our people planted this lemon tree,” he says, “lemons being the sweetest fruit available at the time.”
The first examples of the meme using the image of Abe Simpson appeared on Imgur in 2019. However, this version included a bold text caption reading “What it feels like to be in your forties on Imgur.”
October Used To Be Cold
A new version of the meme without the caption emerged in October 2024 as a joke about global warming. On October 5, Twitter user @iambrattyb tweeted out the screenshot with the comment, “And October used to be cold.”
This caught on fast following record-breaking early autumn heat waves in multiple U.S. states as well as other nations. The meme broke off into two paths—one that used different images to talk about October being cold once upon a time and another taking the Abe Simpson screenshot to speak on other things they remember from long ago.
The meme spread across Twitter and reached similar social media platforms later in October, especially Threads, and working best for those of us old enough to remember anything that no longer really exists. This has millennials feeling the cold that’s finally arriving in their joints a little more than last year.
Meme examples
More The Simpsons memes:
- How the ‘Old Man Yells At Cloud’ meme became synonymous for Boomer takes
- Why the Lisa Simpson presentation meme captured our attention
- Bart hitting Homer with a chair is the latest ‘Simpsons’ meme to take over the internet
- It’s Thursday the 20th, so be prepared to post this ‘Simpsons’ meme
The internet is chaotic—but we’ll break it down for you in one daily email. Sign up for the Daily Dot’s web_crawlr newsletter here to get the best (and worst) of the internet straight into your inbox.
