Snowball Fight

THIS MEANS WAR!

Fortunately, with this weather, we have plenty of weapons. Just pack the snow into snowballs.

Common in stories featuring children. Also may feature as a lighter moment in military stories.

Putting ice—or rocks—in snowballs, however, can convert it to actually serious (if not deadly) business.

Frequent in Let There Be Snow and Snowed In.

Truth in Television.

Examples of Snowball Fight include:

Anime and Manga

Appears in one episode of Azumanga Daioh. Sakaki manages to catch a snowball in mid-flight and throw it back.
Seen in the Welcome to The NHK anime.
Episode two of Zoku Natsume Yuujinchou.
Done near the tail end of the funny chapters of Katekyo Hitman Reborn.
A rather humourous one done in ×××HOLiC, complete with a snow-machine gun courtesy of Yuuko.
In Potemayo, Kyou, Nene, and Mikan's class get into a classic boys against girls snowball fight after the first snow.... that is until interrupted by Guchuko.
Mimisaka of Hokenshitsu no Shinigami attempted to start one, only to end up fleeing for his life along with several others...
One chapter of Keroro Gunsou had Keroro and Fuyuki organize a snowball fight using a modified version of official yukigassen rules. Then Giroro and Paul get a little carried away...

Comic Books

Often occurs in Little Lulu. In most of these, the boys (led by Tubby), attack the girls (led by Lulu) unprovoked, and the girls exact revenge by outwitting the boys.
A short Transmetropolitan whatchajigger has Spider engaging in a small Lensman Arms Race with his "filthy assistants". They throw snowballs at him, he pulls out what appears to be an automatic snowball gun. They use a cannon.
X Factor #53, with Jean telekenetically throwing snowballs, and Scott zapping them with his eye beams.

Film

In Elf, Michael starts warming up to Buddy after a snowball fight.
Jack Frost (not the killer snowman) gets into a huge one with his son and some school yard bullies.
In Jack Frost II (with the killer snowman), there is a charity driven snowball fight where the killer gets involved and he kills the participants in ridiculous ways.
The entire plot of The Dog Who Stopped The War centers on a massive, escalating snowball fight.
In The Bishops Wife, a little girl gets allowed into one with some secret divine assistance on her opening toss.
In Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, Flint, who had never been in a snowball fight before, takes to them with gusto during the Ice Cream Snow Day scene.

Literature

Laura Ingalls Wilder's The Long Winter featured a snowball fight among the older students at school, and their rather young teacher.
Sandy Mitchell's Ciaphas Cain, HERO OF THE IMPERIUM had to break up snowball fights on some of the colder world they were posted on.
- It should be noted here that the soldiers Cain normally travels with come from an Ice World, where snowball fights are Serious Business.
In William King's Space Wolf novel Grey Hunter, after a fight with ice fiends, Sven and Ragnar's heckling each other is turned into a snowball fight.
Most Harry Potter books. Special mention goes to Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, where Fred and George bewitched snowballs to bounce off the back of Quirrell's turban. Fridge Brilliance sets in when you realize they were unknowingly smacking Voldemort in the face.
In Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and The Gray Mouser, the women of Fafhrd's people gang up on their men to pummel them with snowballs when they offend too badly.
In Twilight, several of Bella's classmates have a brief fight with a discussion of larger one after school. Even the vampires take part.
In The Edge Chronicles, Quint takes part in a giant snowball fight with the entirety of the Upper and Lower Halls of the Knights Academy.
In Jim Butcher's Dresden Files novel Small Favor, Harry has Molly practice her shields by having her siblings throw snowballs. (Which is one hell of a lot nicer than what he learned with. Namely, baseballs.)
In Patricia C. Wrede's Thirteenth Child, William and Eff are ambushed by six children using snowballs—and putting rocks in them.
In Robertson Davies's Deptford Trilogy, the narrator's life is transformed when he ducks a snowball thrown by a friend: the effects of this snowball are the motivating action of the trilogy.
Thomas Pynchon's "Mason & Dixon" begins with an image of a snowball fight that also recalls an asterisk.
In one of the 1632 novels, spymaster Nasi realizes that some boys shoveling the streets are planning to throw some snowballs at him, so he pulls a pre-made snowball out of his coat pocket and hits them first. He lost the resultant fight, but he considered the look on his target's face when he got the first hit in to be worth it.
Ayla gets into one with Jondolar and a few others in Shelters of Stone despite being nine months pregnant.

Newspaper Comics

Epidemic. Some of the strips which have included snowball fights as major themes:
- Peanuts
- Snowball fights are Serious Business to Calvin, who takes them to Warrior Poet levels although he usually has nobody to fight with besides Hobbes or a reluctant Susie. During summer, he uses water balloons instead. (Except the time when he saved a snowball in the freezer til July... and missed.)
- Rose Is Rose Clem often hogs snowballs. Mimi catches on quickly when shown.
- FoxTrot
- Garfield and Odie, out for world domination with a snowball catapult.

Recorded and Stand Up Comedy

Bill Cosby, on his vintage album "Revenge", recalls his childhood attempt to get back at Junior Barnes for hitting him with a slushball - he makes the perfect snowball (complete with Barnes's name on it) and stores it in the freezer and waits until July, befriending Barnes to put him off guard...and then finds his mother had thrown the snowball away. So he goes back outside and spits on him.

Video Games

This is the tutorial to Final Fantasy Tactics Advance.
One South Park videogame featured snowballs as a basic weapon. The upgraded version was, naturally, yellow snowballs.
Super Robot Wars Z has one of these as one of its crossover antics.
Past Christmas Events in EVE Online enabled snowball fights between mile-long space battleships.
The Bionicle website used to have a game where Matorans are in a snowball fight. Every time one of them got hit, snow would gradually build up on their body until they rolled away in a giant snowball.
One of the mini-games you play in the Skill Course in the Pokeathalon in Pokémon Heart Gold and Soul Silver is a snowball fight between four different teams of 3 Pokemon. The team that gets the most points by hitting the other Pokemon wins.
Out of the many weapons that are used in Neopets' Battledome, several of them are snowballs, which are all one-use items.
Bug!! has the snow flea enemies in The Burrubs, which pop out of the icy floor on both sides of Bug and throw ice/snow at each other. Unfortunately, they're immune to each others' projectiles, Bug isn't. And Bug isn't even interested in their snowball fight!

Web Comics

General Protection Fault had a memorable one, featuring Secret Agent Geek Fooker and his Fiery Redhead girlfriend, using squad-level tactics and stratagems in a knock-down, drag-out snowball-fight against a trio of rival sysadmins. (It ends in a draw.)
The Great House War from Sluggy Freelance quickly morphs into one of these. Becomes Serious Business when everyone teams up against the unstoppable force that is Bun-Bun.
Minus, here.
Penny Arcade. Oops, was that a brick?
Bob and George: Lovely distraction
Nodwick: To Yeager's dismay, Piffany won't let him use the catapult.
In Sequential Art, the kids do it to Art.
In The Whiteboard, an indoor fight breaks out in Doc's office, in the story arc where the cheetah girl Kasi was introduced, starting here.

Web Original

Whateley Universe: Super-Hero School Whateley Academy is up in the Presidential Mountains of New Hampshire, so they get a lot of snow every winter. The big snowball fight around Poe cottage involves a lot of superpowers, including Quake using her powers to force some snow into a snow 'fort' and Phase using her powers to knock it down.

Western Animation

Looney Tunes turns snowball fights into Serious Business, complete with sendups to The Greatest Generation.
Donald Duck and his nephews once had an epic snowball fight in this short, including dipping snow missiles into water to make deadly ice missiles.
- Also, flaming snowballs!
SpongeBob SquarePants: In "The Snowball Effect", Squidward goes into such a panic that he'll lose a snowball fight, he builds a two-story-high impenetrable snow fort.
- At one point, Patrick shows just barely enough knowledge to create a snowblock, a snowpyramid, and even a snowhelix - but not a snowball.
- Spongebob and Patrick have another one in "Survival of the Idiots".
In his cartoon "Tricky Trapper", Huckleberry Hound threw a snow-covered rock at Powerful Pierre, who returned it with a tennis racket.
In an episode of Dexter's Laboratory, Dexter and his father "go to war" with Deedee and their mother, because their mom was the only one who ever beat their dad in a snowball fight.
- The episode was a tip of the hat to Calvin and Hobbes, as seen by the exterior backgrounds being explicitly drawn to mimic Watterson's art style.
Histeria! did a "dramatic re-enactment" of the Cold War in which it was depicted as this.
Done (hilariously) with ice cream in Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.
On Family Guy Brian hits Stewie with a snowball. Stewie responds by firing a snowball cannon.

Stewie: Now is the winter of your discontent!

On Jimmy Two-Shoes, Jimmy's description of this (coupled with a demonstration involving freezer ice) leads to Heloise making a Weather Control Machine.
In an early episode of The Simpsons, Bart is in danger of repeating the 4th grade if he fails his next test. He ends up praying for an extra day to study, and is rewarded with a blizzard. He spends the next day fighting the temptation to join everyone else out in the snow (even Mr Burns was enjoying himself!)

Burns: I was never one to back down from a snowball fight!

In one Shaun the Sheep episode, there was a giant snowball fight between the flock, Bitzer, and later against the pigs.