Styling all Ps inside a selected DIV

Styling all Ps inside a selected DIV

I've obtained a div that I want to work on, cellContent$, and now I'd like to apply par_padding-top to all of the paragraphs in that div. My line 3 below doesn't work. 

  1. var el = ed.getElement();
  2. var cellContent$ = $(el).closest('.cellContent');
  3. (cellContent$ p).css('padding-top', par_paddingTop);

How should I be doing this?

Thanks for any help.