Best way to get candy shards

Is it better to play snowball fights as I have been doing and opening the boxes, or killing a lot of stuff outside of the snowball arena?

If you can farm easily, that would be the less stressful way to get them. Snowball fights get stressful after awhile of losing.

Farm Grawls! You can get necklaces too.....

Grawl farming outside Surmia, or gargoyle farming outside Nolani, can get you a fair amount of shards but also lots of collectibles (necklaces/skulls) which can account for a lot of winter gifts a lot faster and easier than getting them from snowball fights.

snowball fights are slow, i recommend farm charr at the Great northern wall

Charr at Nolani are alot easier. Just flip lever and BOOM - like 20 charr run at you.

Kill...Restart mission..Kill..Restart Mission..Kill

They drop few shards, though. I farmed them for carvings. Which don't give you the awesome Grenth's snowman summoners

im having the best luck south of piken square down in the water. in 5 minutes i think i got like 7 of them. after i kill them all down there i tele back totown and run back and find like 2-3 more. do that for a while and i got enough to get all the weapons then sell the shards for like 400gold

I didn't know people were actually managing to sell many shards after the initial rush. I bought a few shards, farmed the rest...but now people have all lowered their prices (dam, I could have saved money), but by the constant spamming it seems to show that people aren't managing to sell.

I've tried Char, Grawl and snowball fights.

Char didn't drop any at all.
Grawl drop quite a few.
Snowball fights can give you some, but it's not worth the effort for shards.

Grawl outside Surmia is the best way I've found, but sometimes you can hunt them for ages and not find any,

Finally got hammer, bow, axe, sword, wand, staff.

Thanks guys

I've done my usual Griffon runs outside Augry and had lots of shards too ... my guess is that anywhere you can aggro big mobs solo will produce a lot of shards.

Tengu drop them like crazy. I farm the big field of Tengu south of Ascalon Settlement. There's 60-80 Tengu there.

Could also try TSL at Riverside.

I went to this spot just outside sardelac sanitarium that has a narrow little passageway, and a big pack of grawl.
when you first encounter them, they're fighting w/some of the native stone elementals.
chewed them up, but no shard drops.

did it a couple more times --- still no shards.
went back again and they didn't spawn.
tried a couple more times --- no more grawl.

headed over to piken and ran through a couple screens of charr --- over to althea's ashes, I believe.
lots carvings, but still no shards.

gave up and bought them.

edit:
add in a dozen winter gifts.

As someone else already mentioned, you could just kill the gargoyles outside Nolani Academy. A friend and I both were able to do it solo (both of us level 20, though, and she had her level 20 pet with her, I believe).

On my runs I got at least one shard every trip, along with the usual coin and junk drops. Only took me about twenty minutes to get enough shards to get my candy cane sword.