I guess it is not too soon for Christmas presents. About two weeks ago, AppJet and the Google PR Team announced the acquisition of AppJet (the company and technology behind EtherPad) by Google and a few hours after that they made a second announcement about EtherPad going back online until open sourced. Two days ago, EtherPad announced the release of its source code to the public which can be found here. As they said:

Our goal with this release is to let the world run their own etherpad servers so that the functionality can live on even after we shut down etherpad.com.

So, if you are up for a challenge you can read these instructions for compiling and running the EtherPad open source release and try out your own etherpad server.