CELESTE BARBER ON CHRISTMAS HOMECOMINGS

The Australian comedian has had her biggest year yet with a global stand-up tour, a new movie and filming an upcoming Netflix series. But the thing she has been looking forward to the most is also the simplest: coming home for the festive season.

Ibloody love Christmas, love it, and you can’t beat Christmas in Australia – beach, sun, sand, crisp white wine that you drink far too much of in the weeks leading up to it because the minute that new year swings around, you won’t be touching that stuff again for a while, you lie to yourself. Christmas in Australia is delicious and it’s extra sweet-smelling for me this year.

I’ve been away from home for seven months – three months filming my Netflix show Wellmania in Sydney and four months touring my stand-up show Fine, Thanks! around the world. Wow, that’s a sentence!

I’m currently living my dream and I have worked towards this for as long as I can remember. Being on film and TV sets bantering with other creatives and working on comedy projects that make me laugh in between scenes as much as the actual work does; standing on a stage on the other side of the world in front of a sold-out audience and feeling a wall of laughter from thousands of people as they throw their heads back and dislocate their jaws at a joke I wrote, rewrote, scrapped, resurrected, cried over and finally performed and killed. This life is the tits.

I carry a small notebook with me everywhere I go. I always have. I write down jokes, ideas and thoughts whenever they strike. I’m a pen-and-paper kind of gal. I wrote my book, Challenge Accepted!, with pen and paper before typing it up. I don’t know why, but I’ve always had to scribble it all down and see the words in their panicked delight before being able to hand it over.

I had dinner with Eric Idle a few years back and saw that he does the same thing. A lot of creative types do. He has a small leather notebook and pencil hanging low around his neck and he’d write his ideas and thoughts in it. Over dinner at Paul Feig’s house (oh, stop it Celeste, we get it!*) we’d be chatting and laughing and he would scribble something down into this magical book sitting next to his plate. It took everything I had not to dive across that table with a mouth full of pasta and steal that mini book of gold.

I write jokes on my phone, make voice notes and yell punchlines out of context to my husband from the shower so he can write them down for me since my ADHD brain won’t let me remember them. (I need to get those fancy AquaNotes that allow you to write in the shower – genius.) I’ve worked towards this dream my whole life, and am now currently working to hold on to it.

We did 74 shows in 72 cities in four months averaging between 16 and 20 hours in each place. I’d take photos of my room number at each hotel I stayed at to remember what room I was in. More often than not, I would have to confirm with the local stage manager what city I was in before walking onstage to greet the crowd. I never knew what day it was, what time it was and I very rarely knew where I was, but I knew October 28.

October 28 was a warm hug, a safety net, a congratulations, a shot of expensive tequila. October 28 I’d be back in Australia.

On October 28, I would have finished the most successful year of my career to date and I’d be home. It was a new goal, a new dream I was now working towards.

My dad has always said to me that whenever I travel, I should book a return flight; make that the first thing I do. Then, if you’re having a terrible time or you’ve run out of money, you know you have a flight to get out of there. Alternatively, if you’re having the best time of your life, then that return flight acts as a reminder to make the most of it. And that’s what October 28 was for me – a reminder to make the most of it, to enjoy and eat it up because soon, I’d be home.

Home in time for Christmas. Or, more excitingly, home in time for the build-up to Christmas. Home in time to hear the local Westfield not so subtly change its elevator music from Justin Bieber’s greatest hits to Mariah Carey’s Christmas album. Home in time to argue with people on escalators – “If you’re not going to move with it, you need to stand on the left. The right is for moving, the left is for standing. It’s not a ride, Janice.”

Home in time to buy a real Christmas tree that 100 per cent will not fit in our tiny two-bedroom apartment, and perfectly wrap the tinsel anticlockwise from the bottom up, then get sick of it and throw it in a big clump. Ta-da!

Home in time for my sons to have sleepovers with their cousins and friends who they have missed so much while being on tour. Home in time to watch my husband make his traditional margaritas for our friends along with his signature ‘I’m making margaritas, it’s summer and we’re home!’ happy dance.

Home in time to breathe, take my dog for daily beach walks with my dad, help my mum make candles and fall to pieces laughing at everything my sister says.

Home in time to reflect on everything I’ve achieved this year while sipping a Happy Dance Margarita and admiring the oversized Christmas tree that will no doubt stay up until October 28 next year. Home in time to eat everything, drink everything and reset, ready to chase the next dream.

*I also made out with Tom Ford. ENOUGH!

Celeste Barber is starring in Seriously Red, in cinemas now, and is the lead in the comedy miniseries Wellmania, coming soon to Netflix.

Home in time to buy a real Christmas tree that 100 per cent will not fit in our tiny apartment