When Does the New Year Begin?

Got this on an email today:

Advent Begins December 2 - The Start of the New Church Year. We Celebrate the Season of the Birth of Our Lord

“Advent calls us as Christians to ponder again the mystery
of our salvation, our hope that there is an answer to the riddle of earthly life
with its passing joys, disappointments, sorrows and frustrations, and it
apparently dark end in the oblivion of death.

Does life go anywhere?
Does it have any meaning? Advent calls every one of us to stop in the struggle
of life and to look up, to recall the answer to the questions of life. We are on
a journey to our Father's house. The door has been opened to us by the Son of
God, and the way marked out.

Advent invites us to look back over the
long centuries, during which the human race struggled on in shadows. Of course,
there was always some light. It began with the promise of a Redeemer who would
crush the head of the destroying Serpent, the Son of a woman at bitter enmity
with evil.

As believers, we have the faith to know that God came to us
through no merit of our own, and that He comes to us still by His grace. He
calls us by His birth, His life, His terrible death, and His glorious
Resurrection. Advent reminds us that He will come again.”

- Fr. Benedict Groeschel, excerpted from his book Behold, He Comes