A Cookie Tin with a Story

Usually on New Year's Day I get together with my friends Katie and Olivier and their children Nina and Christian.  Katie taught French at the school where I taught, and her husband is from France.  Although we do not see each other as often as we would like, we have remained good friends through the years.  It has become an annual tradition for me to go over to their house on January 1st.  Katie cooks a big dinner, we exchange gifts, and I usually show them a DVD of pictures of my trips from the past year. 

This year, of course, was a year when holiday traditions were cast by the wayside.  But we did have gifts to exchange, so a couple days ago I made a delivery run to their house.  We had a brief visit... all of us masked and I sitting at the opposite side of the room.  

One of the gifts I received was a tin full of cookies that Nina had baked.  The tin originally came from a "biscuiterie" where they had purchased some goodies on one of their trips to France.  The cover had a cool reproduction of an antique travel poster.

Rocamadour is a village in the Dordogne Valley of southern France, and Olivier told me its interesting story.  The town is picturesquely situated on a cliff.  A series of stairs climb from the river below to the summit which is crowned by a shrine.  The shrine is an important pilgrimage site, second in France only to the Abbey of Mont-Saint-Michel.  Medieval pilgrims, including King Louis IX (St. Louis), often climbed to the top on their knees.

According to legend, the shrine was established by St. Amator (Amadour in French) in the first century.  In 1166 the perfectly preserved body of the saint was supposedly discovered and buried in the sanctuary.

It is alleged that embedded in the cliff of Rocamadour is the sword of the legendary knight Roland.  Roland, according to medieval lore, led the armies of Charlemagne to defend France against the invading Saracens.  His sword, Durendal, was magical and indestructible .  When he faced death at the Battle of Roncevaux in the Pyrenees Mountains on the border with Spain, he hurled his sword into the air rather than allow the Saracens to gain possession of it.  The sword flew hundreds of miles to Rocamadour where it embedded itself in the rock.  Yeah, right!