The Mistletones® are all about Christmas.
Christmas music.
Christmas shows.
The sites and sounds that make the season come alive.
That’s Mistletones®.
How we got started…
The Mistletones® were founded by a funky redhead who adopted the name from a previous singing gig. Cathy Goodman and her sister Tori Richter—along with another set of sisters—were contracted to sing for a Christmas show in 2001. Minutes before going on stage, the leader of the gig asked what he should call the quartet of singing related-yet-not-all-related siblings. Cathy blurted out “MISTLETONES,” and it stuck.
Cathy turned the quartet’s title into a production company. The first project was developed in 2005: a Christmas CD called A Very Geri Christmas and a Cathy New Year! The CD features Cathy on vocals and her mother on piano. Geri Goodman also wrote the majority of the arrangements. The CD includes all immediate family members and friends and has been heralded as a welcome addition to any Christmas CD collection.
From there, Cathy wanted to turn the CD into a one-woman Christmas variety show until she realized that one woman wasn’t much variety, so she enlisted the talents of Christen Tebbe, Tori Richter, Jim Ott, and Mark Oppedahl to round out the sound. SNOWBIZ® was first staged in 2007 in Galena, Illinois with an incredible live orchestra, and they’ve just kept building from there.
The group has changed in personnel and numbers over the years—sometimes a group of five, six, and even four—with Cathy, Tori, and Mark still on board from the original group.
The Mistletones® are excited to launch their 14th staged production of SNOWBIZ®, December 7, 2023 with two shows staged dinner-theatre style at the Grande Ballroom, Hotel Julien Dubuque. The Mistletones® have been featured with the Dubuque Symphony Orchestra and at countless private parties, including Lands’ End and Hero 24/7 corporate events. During the offseason, they have been found ditching their Santa hats with gigs at the Dubuque Arboretum and Botanical Gardens’ Music in the Gardens series and as featured performers with the Northeast Iowa School of Music’s Lollipops & Music for Our Preschoolers (L&MOP) at the Dubuque Carnegie Stout library. Now, that’s a whole lotta fa la las.