In this paper, I will use the history of Christmas in Germany to explore some connections between emotions and communities. I begin by suggesting that an interpretative method of discursive ethnography, drawn from the work of Barbara Rosenwein and Victor Turner, is an effective way to approach this theme. Then I apply this method to three case studies: The crystallization of the modern Christmas in the first half of the nineteenth century; advertising campaigns for holiday gifts around 1900; and the holiday observances of National Socialist SA-men in the 1920s and early 1930s. At the same time, I offer an analysis and critique of various appropriations of sentimentalism, the dominant emotion engendered in Christmas celebration, in these three cases. Sentimentalism — exaggerated expressions of feelings tied to family, love, and domesticity — provided the powerful feelings at the base of the “emotional communities” evoked “around the Christmas tree.” Despite the private, apparently innocent nature of domestic sentimentalism, I conclude that competing social groups readily used and abused this cluster of feelings, the central mood of the modern age, for a variety of public purposes.