It started in 1991 from the mind of Greg Bowers, then a student at Lewis and Clark College in Portland. Pioneer Courthouse Square held a contest called “The Figgy Pudding Street Corner Caroling Contest.” Bowers gathered together a rag-tag group of friends and composed a 15-minute show of Christmas music parodies. Thus, The Calamity Carolers of Doom were born.

They won “Most Original Group” at the contest that year and took home the “Figgy Trophy,” an original Will Vinton (Claymation) creation. With Bowers’ inspired writing and music arranging, The Calamity Carolers started building a large repertoire of comedy and music. By 1997, The Carolers had enough music and witty banter on hand to perform a two-hour, irreverent musical review, Christmas Leftovers, which debuted in Salem. The Calamity Carolers followed that success with a benefit performance for Pentacle Theatre and toured down to Eugene at Lord Leebrick Theatre in 1998.

In 1999, the group traveled to Multi-Music Studios, a Portland recording studio and sang their hearts out for two months to produce their CD, “An Unfortunate Christmas.” The CD contains The Carolers’ most popular, zany and well-received songs. Also in 1999, a new show was written and produced to celebrate the end of the century. A Christmas to Forget toured Oregon with stops in Portland, Eugene, Corvallis, and Salem. In 2001, celebrating their 10-year anniversary, those wacky Calamity Carolers parodied the classic holiday film "Holiday Inn" and over the top movie musicals. The spectacle, entitled Holidays Inn (turmoil), went beyond Christmas and visited popular and well known holidays such as: Groundhog's Day, Labor Day, Cinco De Mayo, Easter, and Thanksgiving.

15 years in the making, the now renowned Calamity Carolers, are ready to take on The Big Apple and The Great White Way or maybe just a little dive bar in the East Village. The Calamity Carolers of Doom are making their Off- (but not too far off)-Broadway debut in December 2006.