In a whimsical MMA-style tournament featuring 32 Christmas characters, Santa Claus ultimately emerges as the champion by defeating Kevin McCallister in the finals with a sleeper hold.
Christmas is the best time of year, not for family or kindness, but for one thing: freedom. Kids get a break from school, adults escape work, and we at MMA Fighting can write about anything we want.
No major MMA events are happening soon, opening the door for more fun endeavors. Last year, I wrote an 8,000-word short story about Willy Wonka teaching lessons to five MMA luminaries. This year? We’re going slightly more traditional (only slightly).
A brilliant person named Eli asked me a question recently that might be the best I’ve ever received: “Who would win a Pride-style tournament between all the Christmas characters?”
Imagine it—a toss-up between Santa and the Abominable Snowman, with Frosty bringing Derrick Lewis-like energy to the fight. With no fights on the horizon, let’s entertain some fictional fights and answer this question, except with one major change: Pride Grand Prix were always 16-person events.
There are FAR too many significant Christmas characters to only do a 16-team bracket. Let’s double it up and do 32 Christmas figures instead. But who to include? What exactly constitutes a Christmas character?
Obviously, Santa Claus and Rudolph and Frosty are Christmas characters, but what about Jack Skellington? Is he Christmas or Halloween? And there’s the never-ending debate about whether Die Hard counts as a Christmas movie.
I made an executive decision: any character in a movie, TV show, song, commercial, poem, or book featuring Christmas is fair game (so yes, Die Hard counts, and yes, Jack Skellington is in). I then selected our 32 combatants and broke them into four regions: Elemental, Villain, Anthropomorphic, and Regular Human Being.
Let’s ring those silver bells and get it on!