Silly non American. Everybody knows it makes far more sense to go from small max number to large max number when specifying a date, (eg, 12/31/infinite) and not small unit of time to large unit of time.(eg day.month.year)
(Though, it does make me wonder. Do they typically say "1st of October" in the U.K., or "October 1st"?)
U.S. is typically the latter, (which is probably more accurately where the date order comes from) but most other European languages, AFAIK, only really support the former as far as general structure goes, so I expect U.K. being so much closer to said other language speaking countries, sorta got forced into the "backwards vs. how they say it" order, so wonder if the speech switched around to reflect that?