Decked out from head to toe in vibrant, red velvet costumes, highlighted by soft, snow-white trimming around the collar and sleeves, the Washburns are the physical embodiment of holiday spirit, Mr. and Mrs. Santa Claus.

The staff in the building know Amy from her 21 years with the City of Greensboro’s police department, but their smiles beam like children seeing their first Christmas magic.

“Greensboro is really a cool Christmas town,” Washburn said. “I think a lot of the Christmas spirit transcends the holiday season here. When you have lived in a lot of places like I have, and you’ve seen a lot of personalities of towns, I think the personality of Greensboro says Christmas.”

An Investigator by Trade

By day, Amy is an investigative analyst of property crimes for GPD, a newly created position she has held for about three months. She worked as a crime analyst for the previous four years. In her role, she investigates trends and patterns for officers who solve property crimes, which includes shoplifting, stolen/recovered cars, and more.

Given the nature of her work, every day is an adventure. She doesn’t always know what to expect, but it’s always rewarding.

“As a [crime scene investigator], you have to leave at the end of the day with some sort of higher power influence that tells you in the end, everything evens out,” Amy said. “I’m not going to find the evidence to convict people every single time, and I want to find the evidence that finds someone innocent as well.

“Knowing that you have an impact on someone’s life in a way that will help them find justice and peace is rewarding in itself.”

Amy started her career as a community journalist. After graduating from Eastern Kentucky University, she worked in different states honing her investigative skills and covering a little bit of everything, including crime.

While working in Alabama, Amy was shot on the scene of a pharmacy robbery that turned into a shootout.

“We were all across the street on a porch that was a holding area, and he fired a shot that ended up 10 feet from my head,” Amy said with a laugh. “I just kept telling myself, that’s just a board falling.”

As a night reporter in Columbus, Georgia, Amy witnessed the 1998 execution of David Cargill, the state’s last electric-chair execution. A year later she found work with the Greensboro News & Record. In 2004, she joined the City’s police department.

It was a relatively easy transition, she said, given the nature of journalism, but it didn’t come without an obvious challenge.

“A lot my job was writing reports and taking pictures, which is what I had done for a long time,” Amy said. “But people in the department didn’t know what to think of me when I got here. They’d ask, ‘Am I mole for the paper? Am I mole for the chief?’ It was weird. It took me about six months to where they finally trusted me.”

She earned her colleagues’ trust after helping to solve a slew of tough cases, which proved her worth and prowess as an investigator. It’s a trust that’s helped her grow into a beloved part of the department.

An Embodiment of Christmas by Heart

To understand Amy’s love of Christmas, we have to go back to her childhood in Taylor Mill, Kentucky, a small town just south of Cincinnati, Ohio, circa the late 1960s.

“They seriously put two guys dressed as Santa in the back of two, separate pickup trucks – sitting them in kitchen chairs. Then they’d beep the horn, and you’d run out and get one of those baseball bat candy canes,” she said with a laugh. “That was the coolest thing ever to me, and they still do that to this day – though they drive a squad car now.”

Amy later learned the pickup Santas were the fathers of two of her classmates, and compensated by the local Lions Club not with cookies and milk, but beer.

Decades later, Amy and Wayne returned to Taylor Mill to take in the tradition she so fondly recalled from her childhood. Amy’s boyfriend at the time, Wayne was equally impressed by the pickup Santas, so the couple determined to start their own holiday fun in their little community.

Back in Greensboro, the Washburns approached their homeowners’ association about starting a new Santa tradition. They even poked fun at a neighbor, saying he would be perfect for the role. After repeatedly hearing of the Washburns’ plan, a neighbor on the board brought Wayne a Santa suit.

“Wayne is very introverted,” Amy said. “And I somehow talked him into this. So the HOA buys a couple thousand pieces of candy, we bag it up, then we went door to door with everyone’s little bag of candy.”

Amy originally started as an elf when the couple started dispensing candy 14 years ago, but by 2018 Wayne had talked her elevating to Mrs. Claus, the role she proudly plays today.

What started as a passion project driven by a once-little girl’s starry-eyed holiday spirit is now a tradition that sees the Washburns attend dozens of events dressed as the North Pole’s jolliest couple. From visiting children with special needs at Camp REACH, to the Carolina Theatre’s “Christmas at the Carolina,” the Washburns work double-time this time of year and wouldn’t have it any other way.

“People seeing joy in your eye when you arrive, I can’t describe how wonderful that feeling is,” Amy said. “One year, Wayne said, ‘I don’t see how Christmas next year can be as good as Christmas this year.’ I said, ‘It’s funny you said that, because every year is better.’”