A North Carolina toddler who opened his entire family's Christmas gifts at 3 a.m. Christmas morning was just trying to be helpful, his parents explain. Scott and Katie Reintgen shared more about the thought process their 3-year-old went through when he decided to open up the gifts all by himself.
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The Reintgens were awakened in the wee hours of Christmas morning to their toddler asking for scissors, which they told NBC News was a "terrifying" scene. But by the time he asked, his holiday deed was done.
"The 3-year-old had found his Spider-Man web shooters, and so he wanted scissors to cut them out," Scott Reintgen explained.
Katie Reintgen went on to explain that the little guy had unwrapped "literally everything, from the tiniest eraser to the biggest box." The couple shared that it had taken hours to wrap all the gifts.
The tot, who his parents referred to as "the midnight perpetrator," just didn't want anyone to be confused about what they were getting for Christmas. "He wanted us to be able to see our presents so we knew what they were," Scott Reintgen explained.
"I think he legitimately just felt that he was doing a service to everyone. He will not do it again next year, we hope," he said.
In addition to the 3-year-old, the couple has two other children, ages 6 and 1. They had to salvage the wreckage to keep the 6-year-old happy.
"The 6-year-old is very much the rule follower so the idea that someone would just go down and open all the presents would just be unthinkable to him," Scott said.
After discovering the carnage, Scott was in charge of putting the kids back to bed and Katie went through the painstaking process of rewrapping all of the gifts. Since she had run out of fresh wrapping paper, she had to carefully use ripped paper and tape. When she was done, she put the presents under the tree again.
"Luckily my wife repackaged enough of the presents to stop the villain origin story for the 6 year old," Scott explained in a post on X (formerly Twitter). "We, on the other hand, are sipping coffee and plotting to tell this story at his wedding."
