Style Container border with images

Just wondering. I know you can style the container using CSS, but that doesn't show up in IE. So I was exploring using images to do this. The one time I did this, I added an extra div at the top and bottom to include the background images. Just wondering, without hard coding it in, is there a place I could add this code that I'm just not seeing? Or maybe I'm doing it the wrong way with the extra div's? Sorry if this has been answered I didn't see it anywhere.