Clothes. Shoes. A new iPod. The latest cell phone.

Those are all among the things you might expect a girl who’s turning 15 to want for her birthday. But Alyssa Rose of Chuckatuck wanted something much better than any of that. Alyssa wanted to bring cheer to people she didn’t know through a series of random acts of kindness. And to spread the love even more broadly, she wanted her friends, instead of throwing her a traditional birthday party, to give her a hand.

So on Saturday, Alyssa, her sister and eight of her friends got into three separate cars driven by Alyssa’s parents and her stepmother, and they made stops at various locations from Chuckatuck to downtown Suffolk, leaving broad smiles in their wake.

After surprising her friends with the idea when they arrived at her house, she and the other girls spent an hour and a half preparing for their outing. She had been planning the event since September, but when her friends learned what the afternoon had in store, they came up with some of their own ideas to plant sunshine along their route.

There was the father and son that learned the girls had bought them a gift card at the frozen yogurt shop. There were residents of a nursing home, who received flowers from girls who also stopped to speak to them for a few minutes. There were inspirational messages left in unexpected places and dollar bills tucked in among the merchandise at a local Dollar Tree. The girls left coloring books and crayons at Sentara Obici Hospital, and they left flowers and cards on strangers’ windshields.

When the day was done, it’s likely that dozens of people around Suffolk had been directly blessed in some small way or another by the girls’ generous spirits. When you consider the number of people likely to have been blessed by the resulting high spirits of those the girls had directly blessed, the number of lives changed — even for a brief time — could well have reached into the hundreds.

And it all happened because one teenaged girl, who might easily have wished for her own material blessings on her birthday, chose, instead, to be a blessing rather than ask for one.

The world could use a few more Alyssas.