CARY, N.C. — A North Carolina toddler simply could not wait to see what Santa Claus brought his family.
The 3-year-old boy woke up his parents early on Christmas morning, loudly asking them for scissors. When Scott and Katie Reintgen came downstairs to investigate the baffling, 3 a.m. request, they discovered that their son had unwrapped all of the family’s gifts, hours before his siblings would be awake, The Washington Post reported. And, the boy was thorough, shredding the wrapping paper of every gift.
The boy needed the scissors to pry open a favorite gift he discovered. He ripped several packages before discovering it, though.
“He wanted to open up his Spider-Man web shooters, so, naturally, he needed scissors to cut them free,” Scott Reintgen, 35, of Cary, told the newspaper. “That’s when we realized something had gone terribly wrong.”
Just adding his explanation for why he opened everything! 😂 Also have to add: we’re not mad. He’s a good kid, and it’s a story we’ll tell for the rest of our lives. pic.twitter.com/GKiJjPjQXR
— Scott Reintgen (@Scott_Thought) December 26, 2023
The couple has three children, ages 6, 3, and 1, NBC News reported. Katie Reintgen said her 3-year-old son had unwrapped “literally everything, from the tiniest eraser to the biggest box.”
The Reintgens had taken hours to wrap all of the gifts the night before, according to the news organization. Within minutes, there was wrapping paper all over the floor.
“Yall,” Reintgen wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. “My three year old came down at 3am and unwrapped EVERYONE’S presents.”
The boy, whose parents lovingly call “the midnight perpetrator,” told them that he unwrapped the gifts because he did not want other family members to be confused, NBC News reported.
“He wanted us to be able to see our presents so we knew what they were,” Scott Reintgen told the news organization. “I think he legitimately just felt that he was doing a service to everyone. He will not do it again next year, we hope.”
The toddler had done a thorough job, ripping the paper off all of the carefully wrapped gifts in a few minutes, the Post reported. Now, the Reintgens had to rewrap them before the boy’s 6-year-old brother woke up.
“There was the cold realization that all the effort you put in the night before had suddenly been undone, but mostly, it was just such an unbelievable thing to see,” Reintgen, a science-fiction and fantasy author who wrote this year’s “A Door in the Dark,” a New York Times bestseller, told the Post. “There was not one thing that he left unscathed -- it was all of it.”
“Showing no remorse,” Katie Reintgen added.
Katie Reintgen then attempted to save Christmas for her oldest child, rewrapping his gifts, NBC News reported. She had no more fresh wrapping paper, so she taped the ripped paper together. It took 30 minutes, but Katie Reintgen was able to salvage the gifts, according to the Post.
“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 Reintgen told NBC News. “But our middle child is very much the adventurous, ridiculous, no-rules, have-fun kind of kid.”
After Scott Reintgen posted photos of the wrapping paper strewn on the floor around the family’s Christmas tree, the family received messages of support from other parents who said their children had tried the same stunt.
It was an inconvenience, but Scott Reintgen stressed in a follow-up tweet that they were not angry, adding their son is “a good kid.”
“Sure, we could have gotten angry at our kid unwrapping all the presents -- or we could have fun with it,” Scott Reintgen told the Post. “We will 100% be sharing this at his wedding. It’s one of those unbelievable stories.”
