North Carolina toddler opens entire family's Christmas presents at 3 a.m.

A North Carolina couple woke up on Christmas morning to what they described as a "terrifying" scene: their 3-year-old loudly requesting a pair of scissors.

Scott and Katie's Reintgen's toddler secured an early preview to Christmas by waking up at 3 a.m. to unwrap his entire family's presents.

"The 3-year-old had found his Spider-Man web shooters, and so he wanted scissors to cut them out," Scott Reintgen, who works as a science fiction and fantasy author, said in a phone interview Tuesday morning.

The couple has three children, ages 6, 3 and 1, and Katie Reintgen said her 3-year-old son had unwrapped "literally everything, from the tiniest eraser to the biggest box." The gifts had taken hours to wrap the night before, the couple said.

The 3-year-old, whom Scott and Katie lovingly refer to as “the midnight perpetrator,” explained to them that he unwrapped the presents because he didn’t want his family to be confused.

“He wanted us to be able to see our presents so we knew what they were,” Scott Reintgen said. “I think he legitimately just felt that he was doing a service to everyone. He will not do it again next year, we hope.”

Katie Reintgen added, “Showing no remorse.”

The morning then became a mission for the Reintgens to save Christmas for their 6-year-old son.

“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,” said Scott Reintgen. “But our middle child is very much the adventurous, ridiculous, no-rules, have-fun kind of kid.”

While Scott put the children back to bed, Katie painstakingly taped the ripped-up wrapping paper back together, having run out of fresh wrapping paper. She said she was careful to put the presents up high on the mantle so their 3-year-old couldn't reach them.

Scott shared photos of the moment on X, and received an outpouring of support from parents telling him their child tried the exact same stunt.

"Luckily my wife repackaged enough of the presents to stop the villain origin story for the 6 year old," he wrote in a post on X. "We, on the other hand, are sipping coffee and plotting to tell this story at his wedding."

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com