It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas in Houston -- already.

Anyone who's ever grumbled about Christmas getting too commercial and all the Yuletide hoopla arriving earlier each year is apt to go Grinch over the latest retail trend.

For the first time this year, hundreds of retailers will decorate for the winter holidays long before Thanksgiving Day, a fading harbinger of the holiday shopping season in Houston.

Even before Houstonians have tossed out their shriveled Halloween jack-'o-lanterns, management at some of the city's most prominent retail centers are untangling holiday lights and unboxing tinsel with high hopes customers will be dazzled into an early holiday buying frenzy.

Cissy Segall, a spokeswoman for Highland Village, says the center until this year decorated for the holidays in mid-November. But with the Year 2000 approaching, everyone is decorating earlier, …