When Amy Washburn walks into Greensboro Police Department headquarters in December, she sometimes does it to the sound of sleigh bells.

Dressed in red velvet trimmed with white and accompanied by her husband, Wayne, Washburn transforms from investigative analyst to Mrs. Claus – spreading holiday cheer through a building where most people know her for a very different reason.

After 21 years with the City of Greensboro’s police department, Washburn is a familiar face – but seeing her in full North Pole regalia still brings out smiles more often associated with Christmas morning than with police work.

“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.”

By day, Washburn works at the Police Department as an investigative analyst focusing on property crimes, a position created earlier this year. She analyzes trends and patterns related to shoplifting, stolen vehicles, and other nonviolent offenses – providing officers with information that helps them solve cases.

Before stepping into the new role, she spent four years as a crime analyst, and the work rarely looks the same from one day to the next.

She said that that uncertainty is part of what makes the job meaningful.

She said that, 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. 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.”

She added that she gets a lot out of it.

“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,” she said.

Before joining GPD, Washburn worked as a community journalist, a career that took her across several states and immersed her in crime reporting long before she entered law enforcement. After graduating from Eastern Kentucky University, she covered everything from local features to breaking crime scenes, experiences that would later shape her transition into police work.

While reporting in Alabama, she was on the scene of a pharmacy robbery that escalated 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,” Washburn said, laughing. “I just kept telling myself, that’s just a board falling.”

As a night reporter in Columbus, Georgia, Washburn also witnessed a moment of history – the 1998 execution of David Cargill, that state’s last execution carried out using the electric chair. A year later, she joined the Greensboro News & Record, and, in 2004, she made the jump from journalism to the Greensboro Police Department.

The transition, she said, came with skepticism.

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

That trust came after Washburn helped solve several difficult cases, establishing herself as an asset rather than an outsider.

Over time, she became a well-liked and respected presence in the department – a reputation that makes her December transformation all the more striking.

Washburn’s love of Christmas dates back to her childhood in Taylor Mill, Kentucky, a small town just south of Cincinnati. From the late 1960s, she remembers a tradition that felt magical to a child – two men dressed as Santa Claus riding in the backs of pickup trucks, seated on kitchen chairs, horns blaring as kids rushed outside.

“They seriously put two guys dressed as Santa in the back of two separate pickup trucks,” she said. “Then they’d beep the horn, and you’d run out and get one of those baseball-bat candy canes.”

Only later did she learn the Santas were fathers of her classmates, compensated by the local Lions Club not with milk and cookies, but instead with beer.

Decades later, Washburn returned to Taylor Mill with Wayne – then her boyfriend – to relive the tradition.

Both were charmed enough that they decided to recreate something similar in their own Greensboro neighborhood. After approaching their homeowners’ association with the idea, a neighbor on the board eventually handed Wayne a Santa suit.

“Wayne is very introverted,” Washburn said. “And I somehow talked him into this.”

The HOA bought thousands of pieces of candy; the couple bagged them up, and they went door to door handing them out. Washburn initially dressed as an elf, but by 2018 Wayne had convinced her to step into the role she now embraces – Mrs. Claus.

What began as a small neighborhood effort has grown into a December schedule packed with appearances across Greensboro. The Washburns now attend dozens of events each holiday season, visiting children with special needs at Camp REACH, participating in programs like the Carolina Theatre’s “Christmas at the Carolina” and showing up anywhere a little Christmas spirit is welcome.

“People seeing joy in your eye when you arrive, I can’t describe how wonderful that feeling is,” Washburn 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.’”

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