Yeah, the whole thing about jQuery is that you don't have to know design pattern to get things done. By the time you need design patterns, you are probably developing complex plugins or app, in which case, saying that:

    $('#container').toggle(function(){}, function(){});

follows the strategy pattern, is essentially meaningless without context or explanation. Just reading the wikipedia design patterns page is probably more helpful:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_Patterns and move on to GoF for more advanced theory.

Also, I do the $var differentiation too. It may be ugly, but it comes in real handy, because you automatically decipher whether a variable is a $('div') or a div.