Doing something before load

Doing something before load

I have a website which is using jquery to hide some divs on load simply using $("#id").hide(); This occurs after the page loads which is great except for this one situation that I have. 

My page is pulling in ALOT of content into this div that I want to hide. It is basically a <ul> with ALOT of <li>'s. What ends up happening is when you visit the website, as the page is loading and is building this list of <li>'s the user can actually see the list, then when the list is finished populating javascript kicks in and hides the div. So you end up seeing the list for a fraction of a second. 

Is there any clean way of getting around this? If I use CSS to hide this div rather than javascript then non javascript users won't be able to use this feature of the page.

Thanks in advance