jQuery $.closest() (Or whichever comes first)

Question

While working a project tonight, I ended up using one .js resource file for two different pages. One page contains a textarea within a div, and another contains a textarea within a td. Wanting to work with the siblings of this textarea, and other children of its parent, I wondered how you could best implement "closest div or td, whichever comes first" logic via jQuery syntax.

What are your guys' suggestions?

Answer 1

Have you tried:

$.closest("td, div")

?

Answer 2

As an alternative to what cletus mentioned, what is wrong with simply:

$("#textareaId").parent()