I am working on a sidebar for my website. When a user hovers over a category, a submenu opens up and when a user hovers over this submenu I would like the corresponding category background color to change. I created a jsfiddle to help illustrate my problem. I appreciate any help in this regard. I was thinking something along the lines of: $(".sidemenu").hover(function(){ $("category").closest().parent().css("background-color","red"); }); Here is the JSFiddle http://jsfiddle.net/ahren/BGcDc/8/