Jquery Tabs - Showing all divs instead of just parent

I want to know how to show all content of a div.  For any given div if it and all its children and grand children to the 100th generation are hidden whether they be paragraph tags or script tags or any tag you can possibly think of and whatever is inside them how do I make it all show.  Like as if it were a bag and I just dumped out everything in it so that everything is lying there on the floor how do I do it?  I tried the contents() but it only shows some things.  I want to show everything every last tag text script tag it doesn't matter.  All the Children grand children and great grand children to the infinite generation.