make TextEdit open new document by default

Re-opening this old topic which has been closed, and the Apple Recommended answer (which is read the manual) does not offer an answer at all.

I'm pretty sure this used to happen automatically, but somewhere along the update trail things changed so that now when I open TextEdit it assumes I want to open an existing file. Which I never do. Yes, New Document is just one click away, but it bugs me that I have this extra step now. I don't see any way to force it to open a new document by default when opening, but really hope I'm missing some way to do that. Any help?