Behold! Another booze marketing week is born. Seattle Aquavit Week is now a thing, and just in time for Christmas. Running December 6 through 12 at bars and restaurants across the city, the event includes drink specials, parties, education, and more. While it's probably organized in hopes of driving up aquavit sales for the holidays, it's also actually worth participating in.

As spirits go, aquavit is woefully underappreciated, especially for a town built on the backs of poor Scandinavian immigrants. It's Scandinavia's answer to gin—distilled from potatoes or grain, and infused with herbs and spices. Long before the new condos and freshly financed Teslas, Seattle used to be kind of a working-class town. Scandinavian fishermen who lacked the option of telecommuting when the weather got nasty found solace in their native spirit after a long, hard day of cleaning up fish guts. Drinking aquavit is basically like getting shitfaced on a history lesson, which is awesome.

If you don’t reside in Ballard, or spend a lot of time at nerdy craft cocktail bars, you may not be intimately familiar with the spirit—which is a shame. Now is your chance: The Nordic Heritage Museum is launching an exhibit called “Skål! Scandinavian Spirits” (December 11-February 28) that honors our city’s original drinkers, bars across town are running aquavit drink specials, the Bravehorse Tavern is serving up meat smoked over aquavit lees, and if that wasn’t enough already, Full Tilt went ahead and made ice cream out of the stuff.