That's an interesting thought. Initially, only one came to mind, an Electrolux 1205 that my dad got for me at Goodwill, when I was moving into an apartment after staying at my parents' house for 11 months while going through my divorce. As I was packing up my car before spending my first night in the apartment, he stuck it in my trunk as sort of a going away present.
As I thought about it more, I realized there had been a couple of other machines my parents had given me over the years, which had come and gone out of my hands long before I started collecting vacuum cleaners. These included a tan and green "Brady Bunch" Hoover Convertible they had bought in the early '70s and handed off to me when they replaced it in the late '80s, a Hoover Quik-Broom, which I received for Christmas in 1986, just after I graduated from college, and a Eureka Princess Power Team that had been my grandmother's. There was also a Kirby Heritage 1HD that my dad had bought at Goodwill and put in the attic because it was too heavy for Mom to use. He told me to go get it after I related how I had rescued a Kirby Gsix from a dumpster at my apartment complex. My girlfriend at the time 'borrowed' it a short time later, and I never gave it back, eventually leaving it in her apartment when she moved out of it. I realize now that some of these former machines, especially the loss of a couple of them, helped fuel my collecting obsession.
Another borderline case is my Dayton wet/dry shop vac that came from a retail store where I used to work. It was store equipment, not merchandise, and we almost never used it. Eventually, the manager grew tired of having it clutter up our small stockroom, so one day when we were cleaning up back there, she told me to pitch it into the dumpster, but if it ended up in the back of my car, she didn't want to know about it. Needless to say, it ended up in the back of my car and I didn't tell her. From my perspective, she gave it to me without really giving it to me. That way, she retained plausible deniability, since she made sure not to see it going out the back door or into my car.
Additionally, there are a couple of vacuums from my parents' house that I took while they were packing up to move to a retirement community. They didn't exactly give them to me; I took them under blanket permission to grab anything that wasn't going with them. I grabbed a Hoover QuikBroom, like the one I had gotten for Christmas 30 years before, from a massive Goodwill pile in the basement and I found an Electrolux 1205 in the attic that Dad had rescued from a neighbor's trash pile when I was in high school. When I told Dad about the 1205, he was happy for me to have it, but was also a bit confused. He said he thought he'd already given it to me several years before. I never could get him to understand that there were two 1205s. In his mind, he had conflated them into one.
The last one that comes to mind is the other Hoover QuikBroom that I own. It was sent to me several years ago by a fellow VacuumLand member, who only requested that I reimburse him for the cost of shipping, and didn't seem terribly worried about even that. So, although money did change hands, it was technically as much a gift as a sale. It was generous, either way.
